Salem Witchcraft Begins: Doctor Suspects Bewitchment

Dr. William Griggs could not explain what was wrong with the two girls. Betty Parris, nine, and her cousin Abigail Williams, eleven, had been screaming, contorting their bodies into impossible positions, throwing objects, and complaining of being pricked by invisible pins. After exhausting his medical knowledge, Griggs offered his diagnosis on February 8, 1692: the girls were bewitched. His declaration set in motion the Salem witch trials, the deadliest witch hunt in American history. The afflictions had started weeks earlier in the household of Reverend Samuel Parris, the minister of Salem Village, Massachusetts Bay Colony. Parris was an unpopular figure who had inflamed tensions between Salem Village, a farming community, and the wealthier Salem Town. The village was riven by property disputes, boundary conflicts, and religious disagreements. Accusations of witchcraft provided a framework for settling old scores. Under pressure to name their tormentors, the girls accused three women: Tituba, an enslaved woman in the Parris household; Sarah Good, a homeless beggar; and Sarah Osborne, an elderly woman who rarely attended church. Tituba, under interrogation, confessed to practicing witchcraft and claimed there were other witches in Salem, transforming an isolated accusation into a conspiracy. Her confession electrified the community. More girls and young women began exhibiting symptoms and naming accused witches. The accusations spread outward from society’s margins to its center, eventually targeting a former minister, a wealthy shipowner’s wife, and other respectable citizens. A special court, the Court of Oyer and Terminer, was established in May 1692 to hear the cases. By the time Governor William Phips dissolved the court in October 1692, twenty people had been executed, fourteen of them women. Nineteen were hanged; one man, Giles Corey, was pressed to death under heavy stones for refusing to enter a plea. At least five others died in jail. The trials collapsed when the accusers began naming the governor’s wife and other prominent figures, and when Increase Mather argued that spectral evidence, testimony that the accused’s spirit had appeared to the witness, was unreliable. Salem became America’s enduring parable about what happens when fear, religious certainty, and unchecked judicial power converge.