Rosalyn Schanzer - Witches - The Absolutely True Tale of Disaster in Salem

Chief Justice—Court of Oyer and Terminer

GEORGE CORWIN

High Sheriff of Essex County

WITCHES! For centuries, these horrid creatures have invaded the nightmares of superstitious souls around the world. Who was to blame for causing a terrible, unexplained pain or an untimely death? What if your farm animals fell into a fit and began to dance and roar, or your milk jug shattered before your eyes for no reason, or your child was born deformed? A wicked witch must have been casting spells to harm the innocent or to settle a score.

In European lore, witches consorted with spirits shaped like animals; vicious cats perhaps, or wild black hogs, or birds. Far more sinister was the idea that witches were the enemies of God—and the agents of Satan himself.

But the most frightening thing of all was this: Anyone could be a witch—your own mother or father, your best friend, your tiny baby brother, or even your dog. And you might never know who was in league with the Devil until it was too late.

A cross the wide ocean they came, European emigrants looking for a new beginning on American shores. Many settled in New England, and among these were the Puritans, an English religious sect hoping to live a simple, God-fearing life and to create a heaven on earth. Even before their first ships set sail for the port of Salem Town, Massachusetts, in 1629, they had bucked the British tide for years in an effort to purify their church, banishing every trace of pomp and circumstance, from priestly vestments and music to incense and colorful stained glass windows.

Yet with all their fine intentions, the voyagers had brought along a stowaway from their former home—a terrifying, ancient idea fated to wreak havoc in their new land. For the Puritans believed in the existence of two entirely different worlds.

The first of these was the Natural World of human beings and everything else we can see or touch or feel. But rooted deep within the Puritans’ souls like some strange invasive weed lurked their belief in a second world, an Invisible World swarming with shadowy apparitions and unearthly phantoms of the air.

To be sure, many spirits in this hidden world were wondrous and benevolent. These winged seraphs were the angels of the Lord, who wished only to protect the living or offer advice in times of trouble. But the Invisible World was perilous too, boiling over with fire and brimstone and legions of evil, malicious creatures. So great was their power that they dared to do battle with God’s own angels—and the leader of them all was the Devil, a fallen angel himself!

The Devil’s malice was most fierce and most cunning when he waged his wicked wars upon God’s Children. To that end, he and his brutes, each one a fiend to the bone, formed a vicious army determined to destroy everything that was good in the Natural World. Among Satan’s soldiers were foul-smelling souls of the dead, horrid imps of darkness cleverly disguised as animals, and a ghastly knot of demonic fallen angels who denounced the word of God. And perhaps worst of all were the Devil’s witches, for they could hide in the land of mortals to cast their spells upon the innocent.

The Puritans were terrified by this Invisible World, whose hideous creatures were every bit as real to them as their own families, neighbors, and farm animals.

Puritan ministers preached that it was God Almighty who controlled these two worlds, and he was fearsome, vengeful, and easy to displease. Though pious Children of the Lord might be rewarded for good behavior, any sinners who did not obey his laws would be punished along with their entire communities. And here’s a surprise: Because God was all-powerful, even the Devil and the demons and the witches were under his control. Satan was truly an instrument of the Lord, for it was God himself who loosened the Devil’s chains and allowed this horrid creature to mete out God’s punishments.

The Puritans trusted that God did everything for a reason, so they took note of the things happening all around them in the belief that he was sending them signs. And as more and more Puritans spread outward from Salem Town, Massachusetts, to build new towns and farms on Indian territory in Maine and New Hampshire, they discovered a multitude of horrifying signs in America—if only anyone could figure out what they meant!

EARTHQUAKES, DROUGHTS, FIRES, and a PLAGUE OF FLIES ravaged the land.

Fierce HURRICANES swept the seas, obliterating every ship in their path.

Blazing COMETS and SHOOTING STARS streaked across the sky, eclipses blocked out the sun, and the colorful lights of the AURORA BOREALIS danced and swirled through the night.

There was DISEASE aplenty: Deadly smallpox epidemics devastated entire populations, while malaria, yellow fever, measles, and other maladies tormented young and old alike.

Two fearsome WARS between the English and the Indians raged for 14 years all throughout New England, destroying farms and villages on both sides and causing terrified Puritans to flee back to the relative safety of Salem Town and a nearby farming community called Salem Village.

To the Puritans, every one of these signs seemed to signal God’s wrath.

And God’s wrath was exactly what was troubling Reverend Samuel Parris, the Puritan minister of little Salem Village.

It was early January 1692, and every member of the Parris household was shivering with cold. Each night the water inside their house would turn to solid ice as a shrieking wind howled on, whistling through cracks in their walls and floorboards. Reverend Parris was extremely upset, and there were three reasons why.

First was the firewood promised in his contract with the Salem Village church (there was hardly any left).

Second was his promised pay (there wasn’t any). A church committee of wealthy merchants and landholders in Salem Village disapproved of Reverend Parris and had just voted down a tax that was supposed to provide the money. Parris was enraged and began making fiery sermons, thundering from his pulpit that these “Wicked and Reprobate men” had joined forces with the Devil to destroy the Puritan religion and all that it stood for. “…Here are but two parties in the world,” Parris proclaimed, “the Lamb and his followers, and the dragon and his followers. Everyone is on one side or the other.”

But the third reason was by far the worst of all. Something was terribly wrong with the reverend’s nine-year-old daughter, Betty, and his orphaned eleven-year-old niece, Abigail Williams.

Normally, the Parris household would have been a hive of activity filled with eight hard-working people. Besides Parris, who was forever sitting beneath his map of the world to write yet another terrifying sermon, there was his good-hearted but somewhat frail wife, Elizabeth. There were the couple’s three children—Thomas, age 10; Betty; and little Susannah, 4 years old—and there was Parris’s niece, Abigail.