The Thing About Salem Podcast

The Podcast of the Salem Witch Trials

Week 8 Blog: Salem Witch Trials Doctors, Families, Frontier, and the Fight to Survive

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February 16-22, 2026

This week in Salem Witch Trials Daily covers a remarkable stretch of ground. Starting with the physicians who shaped colonial medicine and the diagnosis that set 1692 in motion, the week moves through the complex legacy of the Putnam family, the life and execution of John Proctor, the deep roots of frontier trauma in Maine and New Hampshire, and finally to the strategies the accused used simply to stay alive. Across seven days of content, one theme keeps returning: nothing about this crisis was simple, and very few people played only one role in it.

February 16: Colonial Physicians and the “Evil Hand”

On this date in 1692, physician William Griggs Sr. purchased a home and land in Salem Village for 71 pounds. He and his wife had already been living in Salem Village for at least two years before this purchase, having previously resided in Boston, Roxbury, and Rumney Marsh. Also in the household was his niece, Elizabeth Hubbard, who would become one of the central afflicted figures just days later, showing symptoms on February 25.

Griggs is most remembered for what he did professionally in those first weeks of the crisis. It is widely believed that he was the physician who examined Betty Parris and Abigail Williams and declared them to be under an “evil hand.” That phrase was enormously consequential: it shifted the situation from a medical problem to a spiritual and legal one. It is worth noting, however, that the historical source behind this famous diagnosis does not actually name the physician. It remains possible that another Salem-area or Boston-area doctor made the determination.

Governor John Winthrop of the Massachusetts Bay Colony was himself a physician. His son, John Winthrop Jr., was both a noted physician and an alchemist, and went on to serve as governor of Connecticut. His grandson, Waitstill Winthrop, also practiced medicine. In the Salem area specifically, the years just before 1692 saw the deaths of several practitioners: George Emery died in 1687, Daniel Weld in 1690, and the physician John Swinnerton also in 1690. Job Swinnerton Jr., John’s nephew, and his wife Esther were among the signers of the petition supporting Rebecca Nurse, showing that medical families were also embedded in village politics.

One of the witch trial judges, Bartholomew Gedney, left behind sixty pounds worth of drugs and medicinal instruments at his death. He was mentioned during the trial of Martha Cory, who said that ointments found on her property came from Gedney’s recipe.

Boston’s medical community also contributed a significant precedent. In 1688, Dr. Thomas Oakes diagnosed the Goodwin children of Boston, concluding, as Cotton Mather recorded in “Memorable Providences,” that nothing but “hellish witchcraft” could explain their symptoms. That case led to the trial and execution of Goody Glover, and it established a pattern of diagnosis that would echo through to 1692.

Among the most striking windows into colonial medicine is the surviving remedy collection of Salem physician Zerubabel Endicott, who died in 1684. His prescriptions reflect the limits of medical knowledge in his era. For bloody flux, he recommended dried stone horse liver, baked in an oven used for bread and then powdered and administered by the spoonful in milk. For difficult childbirth, the prescription required a lock of virgin’s hair, specifically from a virgin half the age of the woman in labor, ground into a fine powder and combined with twelve ant’s eggs that had been dried in an oven after the bread was removed. This mixture was to be served in a quarter pint of red cow’s milk, with strong ale wort as a substitute if needed. These remedies were not seen as unusual for their time. When treatments like these failed, reaching toward supernatural explanations was not a great leap.

February 17: The Putnam Family, a Complicated Legacy

The Putnam family was one of the largest and most influential in Salem Village. Their name looms over the 1692 crisis, and it is tempting to reduce them to the role of villains. The historical record does not support that simplification.

The family’s Massachusetts origins trace to John Putnam and Priscilla Gould, who were in Salem by 1641. Three of their sons established branches of the family that figure prominently in the trial record: Thomas, Nathaniel, and John Sr.

Captain John Putnam Sr. and his wife Rebecca testified against George Burroughs, offering accounts of his family life from a time when he had lived with them. They also signed the petition in support of Rebecca Nurse. Their son Jonathan likewise testified against several people while signing the same Rebecca Nurse petition.

Lieutenant Nathaniel Putnam testified against Sarah Buckley, Elizabeth Fosdick, Elizabeth Payne, and John Willard, yet he too signed the Rebecca Nurse character petition. His wife, Elizabeth Hutchinson, was the sister of Joseph Hutchinson Sr., who donated the land for the Salem Village meetinghouse. Nathaniel’s son Benjamin signed the Rebecca Nurse petition, and after the trials ended, Benjamin took in Dorothy Good, the young daughter of Sarah Good. When Benjamin died in 1715, his son Nathaniel, named after his grandfather, took Dorothy Good’s daughter, Dorothy Jr., in as an indentured domestic servant.

The branch of the family that most shaped the crisis descended from Lieutenant Thomas Putnam, who died in 1686 and did not live to see the trials. His son Sergeant Thomas Putnam swore out complaints against thirty-five people, testified against seventeen, and recorded one hundred and twenty depositions, many of them from his own wife, daughter, and niece. Three women in his household were among the afflicted: his wife Ann Carr Putnam, his daughter Ann Putnam Jr., and their servant Mercy Lewis.

Ann Putnam Jr. was the first person outside the minister’s household to show affliction symptoms. She was a persistent presence in the courtroom throughout 1692. In 1706, when she sought membership in the Salem Village Church, Minister Joseph Green read a public apology on her behalf while she stood beside him. She is the only accuser known to have offered a public apology for her role in the trials.

Thomas’s sister Sarah signed the Rebecca Nurse petition. Another sister, Deliverance, married Jonathan Walcott and became stepmother to the afflicted girl Mary Walcott.

Joseph Putnam, the half-brother of Sergeant Thomas and the son of Lieutenant Thomas Putnam’s second wife, Mary Veren, opposed the trials. An inheritance dispute had created friction between Joseph and the rest of the family: Joseph had inherited more than Sergeant Thomas believed was fair. According to tradition, Joseph kept a horse saddled at all times during the trials in case he or his wife needed to flee. He married Elizabeth Porter, connecting him to another of Salem Village’s prominent families. Joseph’s son Israel Putnam became a general in the Revolutionary War and was appointed major general by George Washington.

The Putnam record shows a family divided: some members were among the most active accusers in 1692, while others signed defenses, opposed the proceedings outright, or later showed care for the survivors.

February 18: John Proctor in the Salem Witch Trials

On August 19, 1692, John Proctor was scheduled to be executed. That morning, he asked Reverend Nicholas Noyes to pray with him. Noyes refused, because Proctor would not confess to witchcraft. Proctor went to his death without a final prayer.

John Proctor was born in England around 1632 and came to Massachusetts with his parents, settling in Ipswich. He married three times: first to Martha White or Jackson around 1652, then to Elizabeth Thorndike in 1662, and finally to Elizabeth Bassett in 1674. By 1692, he was approximately sixty years old. In 1666, he had rented a large property in Salem Farms, in what is now Peabody, outside the Salem Village parish line. The family attended worship in Salem Town rather than Salem Village.

Historical records describe Proctor as a stern but not uncharitable man. He threatened to beat his servant Mary Warren to stop her fits, but he also forgave Giles Cory after Cory allegedly set fire to his house and stole his wood, eventually settling the matter over drinks.

Elizabeth Proctor was John’s third wife and the granddaughter of Ann Burt of Lynn, who had herself been accused of witchcraft. That family association likely created vulnerability. In 1692, Elizabeth was accused by Ann Putnam Jr. and Mercy Lewis. At her examination on April 11, the afflicted girls claimed her specter was biting and choking them. Elizabeth’s response was recorded: “I take God in heaven to be my witness, and I know nothing of it, no more than the child unborn.”

John attended the examination to support his wife. During the proceedings, the accusers turned on him, claiming his specter was attacking them. He was arrested on the spot, becoming the first male suspect taken into custody in the Salem crisis. His arrest grew directly from his decision to defend his wife, not from any romantic entanglement, a crucial distinction from Arthur Miller’s fictional account in “The Crucible.”

While imprisoned, Proctor wrote to five leading ministers in Boston on July 23, 1692. In that letter, he argued that the trials were conducted unfairly and compared the magistrates to the Spanish Inquisition. He described the torture of Martha Carrier’s sons and of his own sons, who were tied neck and heels in an attempt to force confessions. Thirty-two neighbors signed a petition attesting to the Proctors’ Christian character, and another twenty signed a separate petition for the court.

Both John and Elizabeth were convicted. John was hanged on August 19 alongside George Jacobs Sr., John Willard, Martha Carrier, and George Burroughs. Robert Calef recorded that Proctor conducted himself with dignity at the gallows, forgiving those who had acted against him.

Elizabeth’s survival came down to biology and timing. She was pregnant, and the law would not execute an unborn child for the alleged crimes of its mother. She pleaded her belly, a stay of execution was granted, and she waited in prison while her husband was hanged. On January 27, 1693, she gave birth to a son named John in that same prison. A death warrant was eventually signed for her too, but Governor Phips issued a reprieve before it could be carried out. The trials had reached into every corner of the Proctor family: three of their children, Benjamin, Sarah, and William, had also been accused.

Sheriff George Corwin seized the family’s goods, including food and cattle, leaving the children without resources. After the crisis, Elizabeth engaged in legal disputes with her stepchildren over the estate and had to petition to recover her dower rights. She remarried in 1699. The family’s attainder was reversed in 1711 and restitution was paid in 1712.

Family tradition holds that John Proctor’s body, like others executed that day, was thrown into a crevice at Proctor’s Ledge, but that his family later recovered it and buried it on his farm.

February 19: The Northern Frontier and the Salem Crisis

On this date in 1692, Massachusetts sent Captain James Converse and Captain Enoch Greenleaf with soldiers to York, Maine, and dispatched Major Elisha Hutchinson to take command of colonial forces there. Three of the men who would later sit as judges on the Court of Oyer and Terminer, Waitstill Winthrop, William Stoughton, and Samuel Sewall, accompanied Hutchinson as far as the ferry out of Boston.

The connection between the Maine frontier and the Salem crisis is not coincidental. Historian Mary Beth Norton and others have argued that the frontier war directly fed into the witch panic. Refugees fleeing violence in Maine poured south into Essex County, Massachusetts, bringing severe trauma with them.

Sorry about that! Here’s the Mercy Lewis paragraph:

Mercy Lewis carried Maine with her everywhere she went. Born around 1673 in Falmouth at Casco Bay, she had not just heard about the frontier raids, she had survived them, watching members of her family be killed in attacks that left her with nowhere safe to land. She eventually found work as a servant for George Burroughs in Maine, the same man who would later be dragged to Salem and hanged as the supposed ringleader of the witches. By 1692, she was living in Sergeant Thomas Putnam’s home alongside Ann Putnam Jr. and Ann Carr Putnam. All three were among the afflicted. 

George Burroughs himself had deep ties to the frontier. He had served as a minister in Maine in the 1670s, then in Salem Village from 1680 to 1683, and returned to Falmouth until 1689. After the fall of Fort Loyal in 1690, he moved to Wells, Maine. In 1692, the accusers named him the ringleader of the witches, the organizing force above and behind all the others. He was apprehended in Wells and transported to Massachusetts, where he was tried and executed.

Abigail Hobbs, a teenager from Topsfield, had also lived in Maine. When she was examined after her arrest in April 1692, she said she had met the devil at “the Eastward,” referring to  Main. She confessed to signing a covenant with the devil, spent nights in the woods, threatened to raise the dead, and spoke familiarly about “Old Nick” as her acquaintance, 

Beyond the direct connections through individual people, the frontier shaped the psychological environment. Puritans understood the northern wilderness as enemy territory inhabited by military adversaries and the devil alike. The political instability of the era also played a role in New Hampshire, which had formally separated from Massachusetts to become a royal colony around 1679 and 1680. That period of uncertainty coincided with a cluster of witchcraft accusations in Hampton.

New Hampshire’s witchcraft history included Jane Walford of Portsmouth, accused in 1648, who fought back by suing her accusers for slander and winning. Eunice Cole, known as Goody Cole, of Hampton was accused at least three times between the 1650s and 1680s. In 1938, the town of Hampton held a ceremony attended by approximately three thousand people to publicly rehabilitate her reputation. Participants burned copies of her court records, mixed the ashes with soil, and buried them in an urn.

In 1682, George and Alice Walton in Great Island, New Hampshire, reported that their tavern was struck by flying stones for four straight months. This “stone throwing devil,” or lithobolia, emerged in the context of a long-running property dispute between the Waltons and their neighbor Hannah Jones. When the stones began, they accused her of witchcraft.

February 20: Salem Figures with Ties to Falmouth

Several people central to the 1692 crisis had lived in or near Falmouth, the settlement at Casco Bay that is now Portland, Maine.

George Burroughs served as a minister in Maine in the 1670s, then in Salem Village from 1680 to 1683, and then in Falmouth again from 1683 to 1689. He survived multiple attacks by Wabanaki and French forces and relocated to Wells, Maine, months before Fort Loyal fell in May 1690. In 1692, he was accused of being not merely a witch but a conjurer and ringleader, above the rank of ordinary accused. He was taken from Wells and executed in Salem on August 19.

Mercy Lewis was born around 1673 in Falmouth. Her grandparents, George Lewis and Ann Awards Lewis, had migrated from England to Maine in the mid-1640s. On August 11, 1676, Falmouth was attacked by Wabanaki and French forces. Both of Mercy’s grandparents were killed, two of her uncles were killed, two aunts were captured, and many cousins were killed or taken. Mercy, her parents, and her siblings escaped to an island in Casco Bay before making their way south to Massachusetts.

On September 21, 1689, a second major attack struck Falmouth. Mercy’s parents are believed to have been killed then, as they do not appear in records afterward. Mercy survived and found shelter at Fort Loyal. The following spring, in 1690, the fort itself was attacked, and Mercy’s uncle Thomas Cloyce was killed. Thomas was the brother of Peter Cloyce, who was married to Sarah Towne Cloyce, one of the accused. Thomas’s wife was Susanna Lewis, Mercy’s father’s sister, meaning Mercy and Sarah Cloyce were connected through this family network.

Abigail Hobbs, approximately fifteen years old at the time of her arrest in April 1692, had also lived at Casco Bay four years earlier. Her confession described meeting the devil in the Maine woods, first when a man came to her, and separately when a cat offered her a book to sign. She said she had also made a separate agreement with men who came to her, promising to serve them for two years. Witnesses described Abigail as disrespectful to her father and stepmother, both of whom were also arrested. Her stepmother also confessed to witchcraft.

February 21: The Fall of Fort Loyal

In May 1690, two years before the Salem crisis, a military disaster unfolded in Falmouth that sent shockwaves through New England and whose consequences followed into 1692.

Boston’s colonial leadership had grown impatient with a defensive posture in King William’s War. Governor Bradstreet and the council were planning an offensive, including Sir William Phips’s expedition against Port Royal in Acadia, a public-private venture in which merchants and soldiers would share in captured wealth. While pursuing that plan, the council also sent two men north to assess conditions in Maine: John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin, both of whom would later serve as magistrates in the Salem proceedings.

When Hathorne and Corwin reached Maine in April 1690, they found the frontier defenses severely depleted. Some garrisons had no soldiers at all. At Falmouth, however, Captain Simon Willard commanded sixty men stationed at Fort Loyal. Hathorne and Corwin inspected the situation and reportedly encouraged the frontier settlers to be vigilant, but the council ultimately concluded that Willard’s soldiers were no longer needed there.

On May 15, Willard marched his sixty men out of Fort Loyal following orders. At daybreak on May 16, a force of four hundred to five hundred Wabanaki and French soldiers attacked. Captain Sylvanus Davis recorded what followed: a five-day siege, during which the attackers burned all the houses, until the defenders were forced to negotiate. The French promised the English quarter and liberty to march to the nearest English town. After surrender, that agreement was broken. Davis reported that wounded captives were murdered, and only he and a few others were taken to Canada. Approximately two hundred people were lost.

Historian Mary Beth Norton has argued that had Hathorne and Corwin strongly advocated for keeping Willard’s soldiers at Fort Loyal, the council likely would not have withdrawn them. The outcome was catastrophic.

The settlements east of Wells were effectively abandoned. Refugees flooded into Portsmouth and surrounding areas. The news struck New England as calamitous: one contemporary wrote that God had come against them with a French axe accompanied by hatchets. Thomas Danforth told desperate Maine residents that if Jesus could not help them, he certainly could not. Meanwhile, in Boston, the grief was tempered by news that Phips’s raid on Port Royal had succeeded and that plunder was forthcoming.

The same men who left the frontier defenseless in 1690, Hathorne, Corwin, Sewall, and Stoughton, would sit in judgment of the accused in 1692. The trauma they had helped create, and the survivors it had displaced, were already settling into Salem Village.

February 22: How the Accused Tried to Survive

Witchcraft in 1692 Massachusetts was a capital offense, and every person brought to trial before the Court of Oyer and Terminer was convicted: twenty-seven out of twenty-seven. At least twenty-five people died, nineteen by hanging, one by pressing, and five from the conditions of the jails. Even those who were acquitted, like Lydia Dustin, could die in a cell if they could not pay the fees required for release.

Given those conditions, the accused and their families and communities developed strategies to stay alive.

The most counterintuitive was confession. Of the fifty-five people who confessed to witchcraft in 1692, only one was executed, and that individual had recanted the confession before being hanged. Confession did not mean the charges were dropped; it moved confessors to the back of the trial queue. Eight confessors were ultimately condemned to die but were saved by a last-minute reprieve from Governor Phips. If the court had continued sitting past September 1692, those reprieves might never have come.

Pregnancy provided another avenue. Both Elizabeth Proctor and Abigail Faulkner Sr. received stays of execution because they were pregnant. The law did not permit the execution of an unborn child for the alleged crimes of the mother. Elizabeth Proctor survived only because the court stopped sitting before her case was reopened after she gave birth.

A spiritual route worked in the case of Dorcas Hoar. Four ministers petitioned Governor Phips on her behalf, requesting one month for her to prepare spiritually before execution. That request was filed one day before the final round of executions. During the month’s grace period, the governor disbanded the court, and Dorcas received a reprieve in January 1693.

Some accused tried to deflect attention by accusing others. Allen Toothaker, whose father had died in jail and whose mother, sister, and cousins were imprisoned, accused his own aunt Martha Carrier of witchcraft. The historical record does not preserve his reasons, but the outcome was that he was not accused himself.

Presenting as an afflicted person rather than an accused person was another approach. John Indian, whose wife Tituba was among the first arrested, had helped bake the witch cake that was one of the early attempts to identify the source of the afflictions. He subsequently began showing affliction symptoms himself. Mary Warren shifted sides twice: first afflicted, then briefly claiming the other girls were lying, then returning to the afflicted role after being accused herself. The charges against her were never pursued.

Petitions and character witnesses offered another form of defense. Rebecca Nurse, John Proctor, and Mary Esty all had petitions submitted on their behalf, some signed by dozens of neighbors, ministers, or community leaders. Mary Esty wrote an eloquent plea to the court. None of these strategies, in the heat of 1692, was sufficient to prevent conviction at trial.

The most effective approach proved to be fleeing. Author Marilynne K. Roach identified twenty-one individuals who escaped before, during, or after arrest. Losing property to confiscation was a real cost, but those who reached New York, where the governor was offering protection to refugees from the Salem proceedings, kept their lives. Since everyone who stood before the court was convicted, not being present was the most reliable path to survival.

Timing mattered enormously. Those held past September 22, 1692, the date the court stopped sitting, were far more likely to survive. For many of the accused, it was not strategy or justice or evidence that determined their fate. It was whether the crisis ended before their case came to trial.

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