He was an outspoken critic of the Salem Witch Trials and often threatened to beat or whip the afflicted girls for their role in the witch trials. Proctor knew Salem was in the midst of a mass hysteria and wrote a letter to the Boston clergy in July asking that they intervene or move the trials to Boston.
The clergy responded but it was too late to save Proctor, who was brought to trial on August 5 and executed on August 19, His remaining family members were either never charged or found guilty and pardoned. The couple lived in Salem town where Alice was known as a pious, honest woman. Alice Parker was brought to trial on September 9 and executed on September 22, It is not known why Parker was accused but she stated during her examination that there was another woman in Andover named Mary Parker and suggested it was a case of mistaken identity.
Martha Sprague then stated that the woman in front of her was the woman who afflicted her. Mary Parker was brought to trial on September 17 and executed on September 22, Ann Pudeator Age: 70s Ann Pudeator was a widow who lived in Salem town where she also worked as a nurse and midwife.
She had a reputation for being sharp-tongued and often quarreled with locals. Pudeator was accused of witchcraft in May of by Sarah Churchill and several other afflicted girls of Salem Village. Some of her medical supplies, such as foot ointments, were confiscated and introduced to the court as objects of the occult. During her trial, Pudeator accused many of her accusers of lying. Pudeator was brought to trial on September 9 and executed on September 22, Like Bridget Bishop and many other witch trial victims, Wilmot Redd had also been accused of witchcraft before in She was an unpopular person around town because she often quarreled with others and had an abrasive personality.
Redd was accused of witchcraft in May of by the Salem Village afflicted girls and brought to Ingersoll Tavern in Salem Village for her examination. Redd was brought to trial in September and executed on September 22, Scott had seven children but only three survived childhood.
After her husband died in , Scott was left destitute and forced to beg from her neighbors. This made her unpopular with her neighbors.
A member of the Nelson family also sat on the grand jury that convicted her. Scott was brought to trial on September 17 and executed on September 22, He was also a well known fortune-teller and practitioner of English folk magic. It is believed that his work in the occult led to his witchcraft accusation.
Wardwell was accused in September of and arrested and jailed in Salem. Shortly after, his wife and daughters were also arrested. During his examination, he admitted to fortune-telling and dabbling in magic and said that the devil may have taken advantage of him for these reasons. He then confessed to making a pact with the devil but later recanted his confession. Wardwell was brought to trial in mid-September and executed on September 22, Corey had a reputation for being a pious member of the community despite the well-known fact that she had a child out of wedlock in the s.
Martha Corey was also an outspoken critic of the Salem Witch Trials and stated many times that the afflicted girls were liars. When Giles Corey himself was accused of witchcraft and arrested in April, he refused to provide any more information on Martha or himself. Martha Corey was brought to trial on September 9 and executed on September 22, , just three days after Giles Corey had been tortured to death for refusing to enter a plea.
She lived in Topsfield and was considered a pious, well-respected member of the community. In April of , Mary Easty was accused of witchcraft, arrested but was then released in May.
She was accused again, a few days after her release, and arrested. She was examined and indicted on two charges of witchcraft.
Easty was brought to trial on September 9 and executed on September 22, He had a reputation for being an angry, violent man and was once charged with murdering his farmhand in He was found guilty but only suffered a fine for his actions.
Many locals, including Thomas Putnam , suspected Corey had paid a bribe for his freedom. In April of , Giles Corey was accused of witchcraft after his wife, Martha Corey , had also been accused and arrested on the same charge. Giles Corey refused to enter a plea in an attempt to prevent his case from going to trial. He reportedly knew he was going to die, either in jail or on the gallows, and wanted to avoid being convicted before he did.
As a result, Giles Corey was tortured for three days in a field on Howard Street in Salem town in an attempt to force a plea out of him. He died on the third day of his torture on September 19, Elizabeth Proctor Brought to trial on August 5 and found guilty.
She was sentenced to death but the execution was delayed due to her pregnancy. She gave birth in January was released from prison in May, Abigail Faulkner, Sr Brought to trial on September 17 and found guilty. She was released from prison in March, Mary Post Brought to trial in January, and found guilty.
She was sentenced to death but pardoned by Governor Phips. Sarah Wardwell Brought to trial on January 10, and found guilty. Elizabeth Johnson Jr Brought to trial in January, and found guilty. Dorcas Hoar Brought to trial on September 9, and found guilty. She was sentenced to death but never executed. Roger Toothaker Died in jail in Boston on June 16, John Alden Jr.
Edward Bishop Jr. Other victims include two dogs who were shot or killed after being suspected of witchcraft. Most of the Salem Witch Trials victims were women but men were accused and executed too. Although some of the early victims were poor social outcasts from Salem Village, the accusations slowly spread to all types of people from all types of backgrounds, according to the book Death in Salem: The Private Lives Behind the Witch Hunt :.
Everyone knew that witchcraft was largely a female perversity, but the reasoning stopped there. The over one hundred and fifty people singled out for social and legal ostracism over the course of included every age, social echelon, and background: rich and poor, young and old, feeble and sharp-witted. The logic seems to have been that physical contact with an actual witch would draw the evil spirits back out of the victim. The ulterior reasons for their persecution sometimes surfaced at the trial.
Often it was little more than a bad reputation or malicious gossip, repackaged and embroidered over decades. A human frailty or eccentricity might be trotted out as evidence. Due to the large number of accused witches, the prisoners were kept in multiple jails in Salem, Ipswich and Boston. According to the book, A Delusion of Satan: The Full Story of the Salem Witch Trials , the accused witches were considered dangerous prisoners and were kept in dungeons underneath the jails away from the regular prisoners:.
These were perpetually dark, bitterly cold, and so damp that water ran down the walls. They reeked of unwashed human bodies and excrement. They enclosed as much agony as anywhere human beings could have lived. The stone dungeons of Salem Town prison were discovered in the s in St. Certainly they were a breeding ground for disease…But accused witches were worse off than the other unfortunates [other prisoners.
The dungeons forever changed people and the ones who were lucky enough to survive the prison or escape the gallows often suffered for the rest of their lives. Interior of the old dungeon, old witch jail, Salem, Mass, circa Such is the case with Dorcas Good, the four-year-old daughter of Sarah Good who was accused of witchcraft in March of and spent seven to eight months in jail before being released, according to the book The Salem Witch Trials Reader:.
While in prison, the accused were repeatedly humiliated by being forced to undergo physical examinations of their bodies. During the examinations the prisoners, who were mostly elderly, were stripped naked in front of a group of people and their bodies were poked and prodded and any suspicious marks or moles found were pricked with needles. Upham describes his disgust over this treatment of the prisoners:.
The results of the examinations were reduced to written reports, going into details, and, among other evidences in the trials, spread before the court and jury. There they were questioned by a judge in front of a jury, which decided whether or not to indict the accused on charges of witchcraft. The trials were then held in the Salem courthouse which was located in the center of Washington Street about feet south of Lynde Street, opposite of where the Masonic Temple now stands.
This courthouse was torn down in but a plaque dedicated to the courthouse can still be seen today on the wall of the Masonic Temple on Washington Street. The victims were hanged by the neck by a rope tied to a tree. Contrary to popular belief, none of the victims were burned at the stake. The reason is because English law only allowed death by burning to be used against men who committed high treason and only after they had been hanged until almost dead, quartered and drawn.
The English considered it an unacceptable death for women since it involved nudity. Burning at the stake was more popular in countries with a strong Catholic church because it did not involve the shedding of blood, which was not allowed in the Roman Catholic doctrine, and it ensured that the victim would not have a body to take with them to the after life.
Upham for the Peabody Historical Society in As convicted witches, they were not allowed a Christian burial in consecrated ground. Relatives of several victims: Rebecca Nurse, John Proctor and George Jacobs, reportedly retrieved the bodies of their loved one and gave them a Christian burial on the family property.
It is not known what happened to the unclaimed bodies, or if there were any unclaimed bodies, but if there are they are most likely still buried in shallow graves at the execution site. Almost immediately after the Salem Witch Trials came to an end, the residents of Salem began to feel ashamed of what happened during the witch hunt. They still believed in witches and the Devil, but they had doubts that so many people could have been guilty of the crime and they feared that many innocent people had been put to death.
The colony also been to suffer from frequent droughts, crop failures, smallpox outbreaks, Native-American attacks and other disasters and the colonists worried that the mistakes made during the Salem Witch Trials had angered God. On December 17, , Governor Stoughton issued a proclamation in hopes of making amends with God.
The proclamation suggested that there should be:. The colony held the day of prayer on January 15, , which was known as the Day of Official Humiliation. This was the only way for anyone to save themselves. People knew that Sarah was not a witch, but they knew she was trying to save her life. What Happened to the Girls? Most of the accusers in the Salem trials went on to lead fairly normal lives. Giles asked for more weight for two reasons. First, he knew that the adding of more weight would end his suffering quicker.
Second, and perhaps the more honorable, he was showing the officials that his spirit would not be broken. Betty Parris is the first to fall ill, and the reason Hale is summoned to Salem. After being discovered by her father, as she danced with the other girls in the woods, Betty becomes sick and unresponsive. The Witch trials in England were conducted from the 15th century until the 18th century.
They are estimated to have resulted in the death of between and people , 90 percent of whom were women. The witch hunt was as its most intense stage during the civil war and the Puritan era of the mid 17th century.
Although Mather was not directly involved in the proceedings of the Salem witch trials, he wrote a letter to one of the magistrates in the trials, John Richards of Boston, urging caution in the use of spectral evidence. It is a dramatized and partially fictionalized story of the Salem witch trials that took place in the Massachusetts Bay Colony during — Miller wrote the play as an allegory for McCarthyism, when the United States government persecuted people accused of being communists.
In January , 9-year-old Elizabeth Betty Parris and year-old Abigail Williams the daughter and niece of Samuel Parris, minister of Salem Village began having fits, including violent contortions and uncontrollable outbursts of screaming. Dorothy Good. Sarah was left with no dowry and no prospects beyond marriage to an indentured servant named Daniel Poole who left her heavily in debt when he died soon after. Who died during Salem witch trials?
The Salem witch trials followed in —93, culminating in the executions of 20 people. Five others died in jail. It has been estimated that tens of thousands of people were executed for witchcraft in Europe and the American colonies over several hundred years. Who was pressed to death in the Salem witch trials? Giles Corey.
Was Bridget Bishop actually a witch? What are the names of the Salem witches? Sarah Good. Sarah Osborne. Bridget Bishop. Often referred to as the In early , during the depths of winter in Massachusetts Bay Colony, a group of young girls in the village of Salem began acting strangely.
The daughter and niece of the local minister, Samuel Parris, claimed to be afflicted by invisible forces who bit and pinched them, In late March , John and Bethia Kelly grieved over the body of their 8-year-old daughter inside their Hartford, Connecticut, home. Little Elizabeth had been fine just days before when she returned home with a neighbor, Goodwife Ayres. The distraught parents, grasping at any Witches were perceived as evil beings by early Christians in Europe, inspiring the iconic Halloween figure.
Images of witches have appeared in various forms throughout history—from evil, wart-nosed women huddling over a cauldron of boiling liquid to hag-faced, cackling beings In early , several girls in the colonial Massachusetts village of Salem began exhibiting strange symptoms, including twitching, barking, and complaining of being pinched or pricked by invisible pins.
The afflicted girls soon accused several local women of bewitching them, A doctor diagnosed the children as being victims of black magic, and over the next several months, John Proctor sat in the courtroom, watching his pregnant wife, Elizabeth on the stand. Paranoia was sweeping Salem, and Elizabeth was being examined by a local judge on suspicion of witchcraft. Watching his wife withstand the heated examination was bad enough, but suddenly the The trials claimed at least victims the actual toll may be higher , with just Live TV.
This Day In History.
0コメント