Salem Witch-Trials Show: Hysteria Then and Now

Barking kids, crazy ministers, and an overworked hangman: It’s all there at the Peabody Essex Museum.

I’ m a descendant of Giles Corey, the only American to be legally pressed to death. Not a great pick-up line, I know, and not cocktail-party chatter, but it does brighten a genealogy heavy on farmers, ministers, mechanics, and school teachers. Corey (1611–1692), a farmer, was accused of wizardry in Salem, Mass., in 1692.

Refusing to plead either guilty or not guilty, he was placed flat while heavy stones were piled on him, while his captors, the prosecutor, and cops in Salem expected him to say something responsive to the charge so a trial could follow. This was, at the time, a legal practice. Corey wouldn’t oblige. He insistently cried “more weight” over and over until, after two days of torture, he died.

Knowing the Corey connection, I went to the great Peabody Essex Museum in Salem to see its new wing but also its new exhibition, The Salem Witch Trials, 1692. The show’s good, though it’s preachy and misses the points salient to our own nutty times. The players too often are cardboard figures. The addition is nice. The museum is astonishingly good and a unique New England experience. I’ll do an institutional profile on it before the end of the year.

I’d call Corey inordinately stubborn. I’m not, but after ten or eleven generations, a great many ticks have entered the gene pool while others have diminished or disappeared. He might have known that the fat was in the fire, or, more precisely, a setup was in the works. His third wife, Martha, no relation to me, would be hanged for witchcraft, and Corey had already been accused of murder, years earlier, for beating a servant to death. So, prosperous as he was, he was also controversial.

In any event, my mother was Italian, so I’m invested in la dolce vita. In Corey’s place, I might have said, “Well, maybe I’m a little guilty” after a rock or two and suggested a round of “Largo al factotum” from Figaro to lighten the mood. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, but two days as a human rock pile? No rocky road to Heaven for me.

The Salem Witch Trials mostly uses objects from the museum’s collection and library, with a few handwritten accounts owned by the Massachusetts court system. The Salem trials in 1692, involving a big area of several villages and hundreds of farms, about 1,500 people, at the edge of the frontier, are a seminal American drama: the trial as emblem of the times. The Salem trials — 20 were executed, and many more implicated — featured a determined prosecutor, vindictive, dopey, and pliable witnesses, and icy judges. Spite flows like a mighty river.

The accused — a cross-section of a broad citizenry gripped by fear and driven to mania — were hapless and defenseless. The accusers, mostly teenage girls, were pieces of work. The meanest mean girls. Praise the Lord, they didn’t have access to social media.

Trials of Lizzie Borden, John Scopes, Sacco and Vanzetti, the Rosenbergs, the Rodney King cops, OJ, and Bill Clinton were signature events in their day, as are big congressional inquisitions like the Watergate hearings and the Army/McCarthy spectacle. In our time, variations of the theme are the demented, deceitful machinations of the Muellers, Schiffs, and Comeys of the world (not a trial but a front-page cesspool) and the Kavanaugh hearings, which, like some of the Salem trials, starred a loony woman with visions.

Not every defendant is innocent. Most, whether by verdict or simple common sense, aren’t. We love the theater, and Americans are a people of laws. It’s no surprise we hang our fetishes and fantasies on a skeleton of legal rules.

The Peabody exhibition profiles a selection of accused, accusers, prosecutors, and judges. It’s roughly chronological, following a mere year when everyone went crazy. The first symptoms of bewitchment appeared, of all places, at the home of Samuel Parris, the local minister, in January 1692. Parris’s teenage daughter and his teenage niece accused the family’s slave, Tituba, of witchcraft. The girls said that “invisible agents” bit them. They barked, then collapsed, then revived to run through the house, trying to fly. They had fits. News traveled fast, and after a couple of days, the locals came to see the girls in action. Soon, copycats emerged, and not all were teenage girls. By the end of 1692, hundreds were accused of witchcraft.

Since the Salem circus was the worst of its kind in New England, it’s always worth revisiting, especially given that the teaching of American history is so bad. Anyway, I hear witchcraft is back in style, as is apocalypse. We thought the Enlightenment had earned good science a place of pride, but now superstition and ideology masquerade in simplistic “follow the science” clown clothes. Science is now intensely political as researchers chase government money.

The oddest thing, and this isn’t covered in the exhibition, is how pedestrian these supposed witches were. They caused children to bark. Witches pinched the accused and made their skin burn. They caused cats to talk. The accused were seen sitting next to a man in black, presumably Satan, who whispered in their ear. Some of the accused were seen flying.

Rebecca Nurse, executed for witchcraft, was said to have placed a spell on her neighbor after they quarreled over intrusive pigs. Corey was “a dreadful wizard,” his accuser, Mercy Lewis, said. “For since he has been in prison he or his appearance has grievously tortured me.” Sarah Cloyce, also hanged, was said to have hosted a coven behind the parsonage during which 40 witches drank a blood cocktail. At the trials, accusers repeated a limited repertoire of fits, contorted hand gestures, and funny noises. At least in The Exorcist we got a rotating head and green vomit.

All in all, a tepid coven. Results of European witchcraft include natural disasters, stolen penises, curdled blood, eaten vital organs, soul snatching, treason, and murder. Salem was a podunk place, and the accusers had modest imaginations.

The handwritten court documents from 1692 give the show a spine-tingling, real-time dimension. They record — in old-timey, glyphic handwriting — the gruesome physical examination of three accused women by a committee of eight women and a male doctor during which “preternatural excrescences” (milk meant for satanic imps) were found oozing from teats in odd places.

Most pathetic is accused witch Mary Esty’s petition begging that no more innocent lives be taken in the witch craze while acknowledging that she expected to die. “I question not,” she wrote to her judges, “but the Lord shall give a blessing to your endeavors,” as she believed witches were among them, though she wasn’t one of them. She added that her accusers were liars and suggested they be sequestered and questioned separately.

A thick, gnarled plank wall from the now-gone Salem jail evokes the no-star accommodations in which the accused moldered after arrest. There’s a good selection of furniture belonging to the actors and some paintings, among them Thompkins Matteson’s scene of the trial of George Jacobs Sr., accused by his granddaughter.

I would have done a few things differently. There are lots of depositions, records of examinations, and trial testimony from 1692 owned by the Essex County courts. They’re online. I read Corey’s file and Nurse’s. I’m related to her, too. Nurse was an elderly grandmother and esteemed in Salem until she was accused. Nearly stone-deaf, she had a tough time defending herself.

Their testimony under questioning shows how rotten lawyers can be. Lots of “when did you stop beating your wife” badgering. I would have taken one of the accused profiled in the exhibition and shown an array of old documents, from initial questioning to execution, with a transcription so visitors can see how crazy and nasty these people and the process were. Jacobs’s three examinations at trial are conflated in the Matteson painting. I read them online. They’re of Law and Order quality and juicy. These would have made good, informative reading. Among Jacobs’s last words at trial were, “Burn me or hang me, I will stand in the Truth of Christ.”

As it is, a big part of the exhibition are wall texts giving a biography of each player and his or her timeline. Good enough, but we want flesh and bone, and that’s best delivered in the words of those involved. The museum does a good job with audio effects. There’s background music for some installations in other galleries. I would have done a simple recording of a back-and-forth examination — get some actors from Boston tossed out of work because of the COVID delirium — to give a you-are-there feel.

The wall colors are yellow, which seemed too cheerful given the subject. Dark colors and mood lighting would have better suited this sinister, deadly drama. The production values throughout the museum are very high. Everything’s so beautifully done. I would have gone Grand Guignol.

The catalyst for the entire messy business was the civic culture of Salem itself. This is not exploited as much as it should have been. A cattier, more contentious citizenry would be hard to find. It’s Peyton Place times ten, with Indians hiding in the woods. A solid section on the politics of the place, especially the turnover in ministers and bad blood among key families, would have been fascinating. The rural areas outside Boston were under terrible economic pressure as especially cold weather caused by a sudden blip during the Little Ice Age throttled farm incomes, putting everyone on edge.

Aside from the teenage accusers, there are a few high-profile skunks. We don’t learn just how much they stink, and for that the curators needed to go for the jugular. Parris, like many Protestant ministers, was a mediocrity and a malicious one to boot. He was late to the clergy, having owned a slave-rich plantation in Barbados. He puffed up at his own importance. He grew up in a big, beautiful house in Barbados and thought Salem was a hick town. A faction despised him, but Salem was a tough crowd. The church there had three failed ministers before Parris. He complained from the pulpit about his salary. He hired a man to walk up and down the aisle during his sermons to poke people who were fidgeting, snoozing, or giggling. He was envious and insecure.

Thomas Putnam testified against 43 supposed witches, the most implicated by a single witness. Putnam also recorded the depositions of over a hundred other witnesses. The Putnam family was rich, disputatious, and aligned with Parris in local religious squabbles. Putnam said his daughter told him she was bewitched by Corey, whose spell caused her to feel tremendous pressure on her chest. The devil, he said, told her Corey shouldn’t be hanged but pressed to death, as he was. Putnam was the one who gained the most financially.

Cotton Mather was then a Puritan savant but headed to religious and political prominence in Massachusetts, partially through his father, Increase Mather. I’m related to both. (You can see why I don’t go to family reunions.) From the start of the crisis, Cotton was an ardent proponent of convictions and executions. He had already written about witchcraft and other infestations of the Devil. He graduated from Harvard at age eleven and was acknowledged in his lifetime for having the best mind in the New World.

No one gave the delusional proceedings more credibility. He advised the sheriff and coached witnesses. He attended the execution of George Burroughs, once Salem’s minister. In his last words on the gallows, Burroughs insisted he was innocent. He recited the “Our Father” without missing a beat to prove it. As his body hung limp, Mather spoke to the crowd from his horse. Burroughs was a fraud, he said, and it was common for the Devil to disguise his agents “as angels of light.” He worked to assuage mounting hesitation so that executions could continue.

After the crime against humanity came the coverup, and Mather was very much a part of this. Near the end of the show, his 1693 book, The Wonders of the Invisible World, is displayed. He wrote it to justify the trials. Soon, though, other scholars criticized this beacon light of the establishment as a zealot and quack. By late 1692, public pressure, especially from people living in Ipswich, near Salem, led the Salem court to suspend executions. By 1694, the gross assault on reason and due process formally ended. Mather grew to be horrified by his role, especially after it contributed to Harvard’s denying him the college’s presidency.

Indeed, the affair stinks of Harvard’s best and brightest, and it goes beyond the Mathers. John Hathorne, one of the judges, was the treasurer of Harvard. John Proctor, of The Crucible fame, protested to five prominent Boston ministers, all connected to Harvard, that the trials were rigged. His appeal went nowhere fast. The smug certainty among a class of Harvard poo-bahs looks familiar. I’m a big believer of institutional DNA, which causes bad behavior to rear its ugly head and toss its curls, over and over.

The exhibition asks visitors to “join us in paying tribute to the innocent people lost . . . and reflecting on injustices, perpetrated then and now, as a result of ignorance, intolerance, and fear.” There’s a memorial wall with the name of each of the wrongfully executed. It’s maudlin, meant to leave us sniffling in our hankies, and trite. I would have ditched it and focused the space on something that’s actually educational. What we get instead is prime gallery real estate used for middlebrow, soothing, low-Episcopal bromides.

Why is the Salem witchcraft trial relevant today? The hysteria wasn’t really about ignorance. That’s the wrong word. “Ignorance” suggests an absence of knowledge or wisdom — that some people simply lack the insight that in-the-know people have. Almost everyone in 1692, here and in Europe, believed that witchcraft was real. Mather believed it and wrote about it. He’d been involved in earlier witch trials in Boston. The English-speaking world had more access to books and news than any other areas of the globe. Witchcraft trials were a stable in Europe and Britain during most of the 1600s. The more publicity they got, the more credible the perils of witchcraft seemed.

Witchcraft was, like the climate crazies say, “settled science.” “Intolerance” is also an imprecise word, because it suggests we ought to tolerate witches. “To each his own,” it proposes, as we watch Biddy circle the neighborhood on her broomstick. The issue of “otherness” in Salem was a small one, so “tolerance” is incorrect. Some were outsiders, or poor, or minorities like Tituba, or different types of “others.” Most of the executed were upstanding citizens, though some had bad tempers and many were involved in family feuds.

“Fear,” yes, was a decisive fuel, but its end was mass hysteria, and this points to the central horror of the Salem trials. It’s not what Arthur Miller contended in The Crucible, his pro-Communist take on the events of 1692 in view of Red-hunting in the early 1950s. The Crucible is a great play. Corey and his “more weight” line are in it. But Miller picked the wrong historical event to explain the McCarthy era. We know, for instance, that many of the celebrities and highbrow types like the Soviet agent Alger Hiss were indeed either spies or useful idiots. We know that Hollywood and organized labor were rife with Moscow-paid fellow travelers.

The accused in Salem, though, were entirely innocent. The trials unfolded as they did not because of ignorance, intolerance, or fear but because of abuse of power, namely prosecutorial power. But all abuses of power, from undue coercion to censorship, and mass fear, the kind of hysteria we’re experiencing in the COVID crisis, are common in human history. What the exhibition misses is the malpractice of the leadership class in 1692. We don’t expect our leaders to cater to mass panic, much less engender it. We hope they diffuse it, taking the exit ramp before serious damage is done, like killing innocent people or, in our case today, tossing millions from work, millions from school, pushing millions into poverty, incurring trillions in debt, and trashing the world’s economy, all for a fiction more fantastic, and more disastrous, than talking cats and barking kids.