The Witchcraft of Salem Village (2024)

Update We have more folk descended from these witchy times in Salem. Read Sheila's review. Salem was a small place, people wouldn't travel far, they married their neighbours. I wonder if Tom and Sheila are related?

Tom, a friend, has left a fascinating comment (the first one, below), "I recently discovered that my 8x great-grandmother was Rebecca Nurse. I am also related to Ann Putnam Jr, whose testimony sent Rebecca and her sister, Mary Esty, to the gallows.". If you are interested in the Salem witches, it is so worth reading it.
_____

I read this one straight through. I t was fascinating in the eager suspension of disbelief by what hitherto must have been believed to be the sensible adults of Salem village.

I am astounded at the willing stupidity of Mather and the judges to believe the silly, vindictive teenagers and little girls. Those scenes in court where the witches had such influence on them that the girls all fell into the same postures as the witches and cried out for release. All they had to do was blindfold them and see if they could then be psychically, satanically, manipulated by the witches into copying their contortions. But they never even questioned them.

The'witches', mostly old women, but also a child as young as 5 who was able to pinch and strangle her accusers according to them, were interrogated endlessly and the girls' stories just accepted. Were teenagers and preteens any different then from now. As Judge Judy says, how can you tell when a teenager is lying? When they open their mouths. I can't believe that teenage girls back then in that particular time and place in history didn't have the same attention-seeking, drama queen ways that they appear to in every other.

Twenty people were executed, on these judges' willingness to believe the lying girls and not question them singly or jointly in a court setting. That some of the girls, and the judges, repented in later life did not bring back those they had joyously, self-righteously, in a spirit of entertainment and sometimes vindictiveness had murdered and said it was, that old excuse, in the name of religion.

It all ended when spectral evidence was no longer accepted. In Europe, in other parts of the US witches were still put to death for centuries more. But Massachussetts had shocked itself out of such wanton barbarism.

In Europe the The Malleus Maleficarum written by a Catholic clergyman was the witch hunter's manual. It is still in print but hopefully now only thought of by all as an interesting relic of superstitious times. However, there are still seven countries that execute 'witches;

Saudi Arabia, Tanzania - which executed 600 elderly women two years ago, Gambia, Nepal, India, Papua New Guinea and Uganda. How people can be that dedicated to their primitive superstitious cultures and religions that they can not only murder these 'witches' but also film it on their cell phones is a dichotomy that is hard to understand.

"By September 22, 1692, Giles Corey and nineteen other persons had been executed publicly. There is no way of knowing the numbers who died in prison.
[...]
Not one person who confessed to practicing witchcraft was executed. The persons executed were those who insisted upon their innocence. Giles Corey was ordered pressed to death by heavy stones for refusing to speak at all. His execution may have marked a turning point in the witchcraft epidemic."

My first encounter with the Salem Witch Trials was in high school, when we discussed Arthur Miller's The Crucible. The play has remained one of favourites since, not because of the topic of witchcraft but because of Miller's skill in taking a horrific event of history and turning it into a parable. (The writing was pretty good, too.)

Ever since that encounter, the story of the Salem Witch Trials and its participants has had me gripped. How could a village turn against itself, neighbour against neighbour, into such madness? Surely, this is the stuff that horror stories are made of. Made of. Invented. Not real. For it to be real, there would have to be an explanation, a reason, a cause.
It wasn't a case of people not knowing what they were doing, or outright hating each other, or worse - be unaffected by each other. This was a small community, where people depended on the communal efforts, that is, neighbours working together.
It is sometimes said, that human conflicts are based on the ignorance (or denial) by the parties' of their common ground, their similarity. Since everyone in Salem knew each other, this can't have factored. So what drove these people to accuse each other, and more, not come to the defence of the people they shared their lives with?
The situation is kafkaesque, except it is not fiction.

Jackson's account of the Salem Witch Trials was not fiction, either. It was fictionalised to the extent that she gave the historical facts a narrative, and characters a voice, but it was not fiction.
I wrote in an earlier post (The Yellow Wallpaper) that sometimes fiction and fact are inseparable, and that we now describe real events as "classic horror" because the possibility of it happening is so unreal, so unfathomable, that it is simply beyond recognition. As far as horror stories go, those are the most hard hitting ones - there is very little that is as horrifying as finding out that fictional horrors were fact, even more so when it was not a single incident.

When I picked up this book, I had no idea what Shirley Jackson, queen of the modern horror story, would do with the original story, whether she would add her own take on the story. As it turns out (to my surprise), Jackson wrote this as book for middle school, which is why she kept this book factual and did not add any atmospheric devices or other embellishments. Jackson meant to write this as a work of non-fiction, but even if she hadn't that there was no need to add much to the official records to make this chilling.
In writing this, Jackson created a great retelling of the story of the Salem Witch Trial and their aftermath.

"On September 22, 1692, the day of the last execution, the witchcraft delusion began to disappear. No one realized it at first. The afflicted girls continued crying out upon anyone within reach, the preliminary examinations continued, and the prisons stayed crowded. The special court in Salem adjourned, to meet again in two or three weeks and resume the trials. A change had taken place, however, in the feelings of the people. Perhaps it was due to the courage of Giles Corey. Perhaps everyone was growing weary of supernatural terrors. Perhaps the change was due to the deplorable condition of the colony in general. Perhaps it was a combination of all these things. In any case, a slow change of opinion took place. People simply stopped believing that their friends and neighbors were witches."

I had not read any other book which had investigated what became of the community - and the individual actors after the trials were over. For me this is probably the most intriguing part of Jackson's book (because I was familiar with the story of the trials).
How did the persecutors live the survivors and themselves after the events?
How did the community heal after this madness? Did it heal?
Jackson dedicates the latter part of the book to these questions and some of her analysis and research, even though aimed at a younger reader, is noting less than compelling.

"John Hathorne never conceded that he had been mistaken, and persisted all his life in maintaining that the witches were guilty, and that the part he had acted was honorable. One hundred and fifty years later a descendant of John Hathorne’s wrote The House of the Seven Gables—the story, in part, of a cruel man who had helped to bring witches to execution, and who died with the memory heavy on his conscience. In this story Nathaniel Hawthorne (the w had been added somewhere along the way) adapted the dying words of Sarah Goode, who stood on the scaffold and shouted at the clergyman who begged her to confess, “I am no more a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take away my life, God will give you blood to drink!” Unlike his ancestor, Nathaniel Hawthorne thought the witchcraft fever was “a terrible delusion.”

This is a true horror story. The sleepy town of Salem Village is being overrun with witches. Nah, just a bunch of bratty kids telling lies. The town was very religious and did not want to hear about the devil, or witchcraft or any stories like this. But a group of children, enchanted by the maid Tituba from the islands, gather round her and she tells the children (a bunch of girls) stories. The girls love it. But they are quite afraid of what will happen to them if they are found out to be even listening to stories on magic and witchcraft and the occult. So, following their Queen-B, the girls make up a story about witches in the town afflicting pain upon them.

It is quite the spectacle. They name a few townspeople at first who are brought before a 'judge/s'. During the questioning of each of these women, the girls, following their Queen-B, begin thrashing about the floor, screaming in pain. Yelling that a black man stands behind the woman telling her what to do, and telling the woman to bite the girls. Magically, in their rage, the children jump up with bite marks to their arms. If the woman being accused raises her arm, all the girls immediately raise their arms, crying the witch is making them do this. Empowered, the girls begin to name more and more in the town. Then, it turns into a witch-hunt with the town minister encouraging folks to tell on their friends and neighbors. A simple charge of a wife and husband in an argument leads one to the gallows being accused of being a witch. Even a 5 year old child was brandished a witch, because the child's mother was already accused and in prison for witchcraft.

I was utterly shocked that the townsfolk fell for this and sent so many people to jail and eventually their deaths. But Salem Village is not the only place this happened during these early times. There were other places in the world where people were accused of being witches and were hanged. Even today I see bratty children accuse an adult of something (child abuse) and the adult is hauled away, then finding out the child was mad as he/she couldn't watch tv and made up the entire story.

I was shocked to see a non-fiction book by Shirley Jackson. I enjoyed reading this and must say, of her work, this is the scariest one of all. A shocking read and perfect for Halloween.

2024/11

It was a dreadful night. The fever was unstoppable, as if it were an animal whose only purpose was to kill its victim right away. The boy was rather sick, lying in bed, barely conscious of his surroundings. The doctor had said the medicine would be effective within a couple of hours, but nothing seemed to be helping him. The mother was in despair, she cried in her room for a moment, then she put the best smile she could on her face while saying to her little boy everything will be alright. 'The fever is not going down, dear, let's go and call the doctor again. He doesn't look right,' said the father, while looking at his child, almost asleep, partly because of lots of medicine, partly because of his weakness. 'There must be something we can do in the meantime, your mother is here, she says she might help,' said the mother, trying to keep herself calm. Grandma was indeed there, a tall, thin, 60-year-old woman who usually didn't say much. However, that night she was more quiet than usual; she had made up her mind and had come up with a possible solution. 'I think, and please don't say anything until I'm finished, but I think someone could have done witchcraft against the boy' said grandma, speaking frankly and without hesitation, as if she had had this in mind for a while.

Grandma had believed in witchcraft ever since she was young. One day, when being a young girl living in a very small town with barely one hundred inhabitants, she remembered having seen a woman cutting her hair and burning it afterwards. She (grandma) had asked her mother why that woman was burning her own hair in that way. 'Witchcraft,' said her mother, without even looking at her, 'she needs to do it, otherwise she will be cursed; witchcraft is responsible for this, the evil one. They call it "black magic."' Grandma had learned something that day: whenever a person was suffering and there was no apparent reason to explain that suffering, someone, an evil being, must be doing witchcraft against this innocent person, who eventually might end up dying or living, depending on the person's faith and the ultimate solution to heal: reversing witchcraft with the help of a curandera.

'Doña Lupe is coming, I called her. She must be here at any moment,' said grandma, with some hope in her eyes. Doña Lupe—or as the mother used to call her, Lupita—had been a curandera for around twenty years, following her mother's footsteps, who had paved the way for a few curanderos in her town by the end of the nineties. She was a strong, vigorous woman, probably in her forties, who almost never smiled, but very talkative and easygoing. Grandma had said to her, perhaps that same day in the morning, that she believed her grandson had been a victim of black magic, witchcraft, or whatever she wanted to call it. 'He is dying, Lupe, and I need you to see him. I need you to help him.'

Doña Lupe arrived, almost at midnight, and brought a little box with her, among other objects and plants. She saw the boy in his bed, and no sooner had she tried to touch him than she couldn't help but avert her eyes. 'God, his soul,' she said to grandma, almost whispering so that the mother and the father couldn't hear her, 'I don't feel his soul. It's not with him anymore. There is also some evil energy in this place. We need to do something, let me do something.' Lupe had asked grandma if they could take the boy to another room, because the room where they were "was not adequate." They had already put chaca leaves around the boy's feet—the leaves previously boiled—to reduce the fever, and even though it had worked at the beginning, along with the medical treatment, at that point they were running out of alternatives.

'Padre nuestro que estás en el cielo...' doña Lupe started to pray, actually, she had to pray during the entire healing. She had mentioned that the boy was suffering, his body was suffering, but also his spirit was suffering. She needed to heal both. She took a brown egg out of her box, and started to rub it on the boy's body from head to toe in order to cure evil, while still praying. 'Mal de ojo seems to be the problem, you know, but look, he is trembling, the evil is causing this, the fever, the illness, everything. We have to get rid of it, quickly.' A thorough limpia—a cleanse, let's call it—was needed, so Lupe started to perform it by taking a few basil stems and immersing them in holy water for a few seconds. Then, instead of rubbing a bunch of basil on the body, she started to brush it on the boy's arms and legs, and mainly on his head. Some alcohol was also needed afterwards, as if the healing was about to end with the kid anointed with it, pure alcohol that would help him feel better. A crucifix with the image of Jesus in the cross was put around his neck, the curandera had brought it with her. 'Look at the egg, look how the yolk stays in the middle of the glass, and these little spots. I can tell, by what I have seen today, it is witchcraft, dear. But he will get better, by the morning he will be much better. I will stay and keep praying for him, for all of you. We need to keep the faith.'

Faith
Fait
Fai
Fa
F
.
.
.

'And that's how you were healed, my boy. Your father thought it was the medicine all the same, he told me so a few months later, when you were fully recovered. But, that day, darling, that day I saw in his eyes, I saw faith in those eyes of your father's. It was the only thing we had left, to believe that she would help her. Witchcraft is a real thing, darling, and we need to learn how to deal with it. I might be an old woman, but I'm not a fool. I have seen things to believe it is real, things that I hope you don't have to see ever in your life,' my grandmother said—may she rest in peace—while smiling at me. I was a 4-year-old kid when, that dreadful night in November 1999, I might have died. Apparently acute bronchitis had been misdiagnosed as a simple cold at the beginning, but then everything started to go wrong. The fever was completely unexpected, nay, it was impossible to be experiencing high fever according to the diagnosis. Miraculously—yes, those were my grandmother's words when telling me that part of the story—the fever started to go down less than a couple of hours after the cleanse, and little by little, I started to feel better.

The Witchcraft of Salem Village brought to mind this episode of my life, especially listening to my grandma telling me the nightmare they lived that night and how they started to lose hope. 'You are a young man now, you are 18—right?—so you must know that it was faith that made us stick together till the end, because the situation was more than complicated. No doctors that day—it was Sunday, bad day to get sick in this town—and nothing to do but hoping you'll keep on being the spirited kid you always were. I had to go and see if Lupe could come, I said "my grandson needs you, I can feel it in here (I touch my heart, I remember) that you can cure him" and she did come, son, she stayed until the morning and never stopped praying, making the curse disappear. It's up to you to believe it or not, but I was there, and I never lost my faith. Never.' I barely remember that day to be honest. There are just two scenes that I recollect vividly though: my godmother staying by the door and my mother saying 'look who came to see you, Os,' and the words of my mother, while being near me saying, almost whispering, 'we have done everything we could, God, what else I can do?'

The Witchcraft of Salem Village is worth giving it a read for many reasons: as a nonfiction book, it reads easily and it explains the case clearly from beginning to end; it shows the ignorance and power of a small group of people when they are talked into believing that someone is an evil being, a witch to be more specific. A mistake that can never be made again. Of course, everything started as a joke, but it ended up being one of the most heartbreaking and terrifying episodes in history: the execution of a group of innocent women whose crime was to be 'witches' and practicing witchcraft. You already know my possible experience with witchcraft, needless to say I have always been skeptical about it. The truth is that, witchcraft or not, what that experience taught me is that when we have nothing else to rely on, the only thing that is actually left is faith. These women never lost faith, even though their fate was sealed from the very beginning; as far as I can see, their faith carried them, they kept holding on, and claimed their innocence. I believe that's everything we need to know, that they never stopped fighting.

My rating on a scale of 1 to 5:

Quality of writing [4/5]
Pace [4/5]
Plot development [4/5]
Characters [3.5/5]
Enjoyability [4.5/5]
Insightfulness [4.5/5]
Easy of reading [5/5]
Photos/Illustrations [N/A]

Total

Thoughts I had while reading (well, listening to; we had it on tape) this book:

"Congratulations, humankind. Your stupidity has reached a new level ..."

"We've had many little spikes in our idiocy over the years, but this has got to be one of our very best!"

"It just gets worse and worse ..."

"Maybe evolutionists have a point ... we really MIGHT have been apes at this point ..."

I've always kinda wandered about the Salem Witchcraft Trials because I've heard them talked about so much, watched "Scooby Doo" episodes about them, etc. This year we finally reached them in history ... and I was kinda excited and also worried ... because I had the idea that it'd be sickening.

However, I do like reading about these kind of events in history. I find them so absurd as to be amusing. However, I don't believe it was amusing for the residents of Salem Village (or anywhere else where this epidemic reached), so I'd better not talk about that.

It was sickening. Mostly because it's hard to believe people could be so blind, so dumb. On the other hand, knowing the times, I suppose it makes sense ... to some extent. But not very much. I guess they just wanted attention. You'll see it today; people will do anything to hold the spotlight for as long as possible.

But I'm supposed to be reviewing the book, not the years 1692-1693, so let's move on.

This was a very concise, easy-to-understand account of the witchcraft of Salem Village (as the title suggests). I found it entertaining and informing.

I didn't realize the Salem Witchcraft Trials were so short-lived! Nor that so many people repented of their parts in the trial. I certainly didn't know that the whole shebang was run by a group of girls (originally aged 9-18, but branching off into adults as time wore on and more women wanted attention) who almost definitely were just pretending out of malice, want of attention, boredom, and guilt (as they'd been listening to a lot of stories about witches which they probably weren't supposed to hear from a servant). They'd point to random people and declare them witches and everyone would believe them! I can scarcely believe this is nonfiction, but it is! It's so unbelievable, but it's true. Wow ...

The one thing I didn't like about this book was the obvious slant against from Christianity, especially in the afterword. If I were to wager a guess, I'd bet the author is an atheist. She seems to blame Christianity (and religion in general) for the witchcraft trials. I blame boredom and a lack of education (or rather the education of those times) and false Christianity.

And those girls, who really just needed a good spanking. So many of the world's problems would be solved if people didn't spare the rod ...

~Kellyn Roth, Reveries Reviews

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ Disclaimer: If you were not educated in the US or didn’t read or learn about the Salem Witch Trials in the late 1690’s in Massachusetts, this will have spoilers in it.

If you were a teenage girl, you most likely were interested and intrigued by the Salem Witch Trials.... as was I.

This may have included all things witchery, mystic, and Mary Worth games (in the mirror and in the dark). Then there were Ouiji Boards and seances. As an adult, I look back and completely understand wanting something magical and a bit spooky. Well it looks like so did people in Salem Village.

This is set in 1692 at the beginning of Colonial life in the “new land” of Massachusetts Colony in Salem Village, which is similar to but different than the town of Salem.

Along those themes, and as part of my desire to read lesser-known novels by admired writers, I’ve chosen this short novel by Shirley Jackson.

I found it very interesting and enjoyed Gabrielle de Cuir’s, the narrator’s simple, clean, and easy voice in the audio. Although I detest when narrator’s whine or do children’s crying or whining. There’s a bit of that but she moves past it, or I would’ve DNF’d it.

It’s about the historical facts of innocent women and men (mostly women of course - insert 👁 roll) being charged with and tried as witches.

A good part of the witchery confusion was due to the girls being young, impressionable, and full of wild imagination, but also because so many villagers were ridiculously gullible and ready to cast stones. Others accused of witchery were POC or poor. All of them were unsure what else to do other than to try to testify and confess their own sins and others, but as one accused another and their mother or husband or sister etc etc, the prisons in SV, as well as in Boston and Cambridge, were full…of witches. There were public executions if you remember your history.

This was an interesting book (at this point in my life) and yet an unfortunate history of our country’s beginnings about a witch epidemic, written by the amazing Shirley Jackson. It’s a good reminder of the dangers of cults, religious fanatics, and herd mentality.