Six Women of Salem (38 page)

Back in April Elizabeth Hubbard had said that Goody Oliver (Bridget) had appeared to her wearing only a shift, but most of that paper accused Mary Warren, so it may not have been used against Bridget.

Susanna Sheldon made two rambling statements, one back in mid-May when she seemed to have been targeted by every witch in the region. Bridget’s specter tormented her with the book, in company with Giles Corey, Philip and Mary English, and the Devil as a “blak man with a hicrouned hatt” whom the witches worshiped on their knees. The whole crew of them suckled their familiars, even the men. Bridget’s imp was “a streked snake [that came] creeping over her shoulder and crep into her bosom.” Both Bridget and the Devil told Susanna that Bridget had been a witch for twenty years. Susanna was not asked to swear to any of this, so it was probably set aside.

Susanna’s statement, dictated to Thomas Putnam on this same day, involved the ghosts of Thomas Green’s dead infant twins, who accused Bridget’s specter of murdering them, “seting them into fits wherof they dyed.” As dramatic as it was, this statement also was not sworn.

Mary Warren’s statement, written down by Thomas Newton, seemed more believable—that Bridget’s specter had tormented Mary back on April 19 after Bridget was jailed in Salem. Mary swore to the truth of this in front of John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin this day, but the statement appears not to have been used against Bridget.

Instead, Newton presented eight or nine depositions from people other than the usual afflicted witnesses: Bridget’s neighbors who had suspected her for years, who knew all about the earlier charge against her even though that case had been dismissed. Bridget had to stand and listen to their stories being read—the strange lights, the dying babies, the sick children, the imp, the poppets, and on and on, with the deponents swearing to the truth of their statements. None of the incidents related to the five individuals named in the indictments as her supposed victims. The grand jury listened to all this, deliberated, and decided there was enough suspicion to put her case to trial. Thomas Newton wrote at the bottom of each indictment:
billa vera
(Latin for a true bill), and below that came the signature:
“John Rucke fforeman in the name of the Rest.”

So now Bridget’s case would proceed to the trial jury before the Oyer and Terminer judges. Time between the grand and trial juries might take days or months, but in Bridget’s case all occurred on the same day. (How much time she had between the courts is unclear, or whether she faced her jury trial before four o’clock, when she and the five other women were searched again for witch-marks by the same committee of women as before.)

Records for all of the summer’s trials are missing. What happened during any of them can be partially reconstructed from standard English court procedure; the surviving depositions; and a summary of how matters went from a critical letter written the following October by Thomas Brattle, a wealthy gentleman and treasurer of Harvard College. In addition, Cotton Mather, asked to compose the official account of the witch trials, provided with copies of the court papers, and, most likely, told anecdotes by Stoughton and the Boston judges, described Bridget’s trial and four others in his
Wonders of the Invisible World
.

Once again Bridget was led into the courtroom, this time to face the bench of five or more judges: William Stoughton, Samuel Sewall, and Bartholomew Gedney plus at least two others, probably John Richards of Boston and Nathaniel Saltonstall of Ipswich.

The defendant could challenge selected jurors before she was sworn in, but whether Bridget did so, for all that she could be outspoken, is not recorded. She had no legal council to speak for her, as this was not yet British custom in any criminal case. The justices were to advise if necessary.

The clerk read the indictments, and Bridget, after being asked how she pled to the charges, replied, “Not guilty.” Asked how she would be tried, she gave the traditional response that allowed the court to proceed: “By God and by my country.” Bridget certainly knew her own innocence, and God knew the truth of things. The court was another matter.

Once Bridget had pled, the afflicted witnesses were brought in. If they had been at all restrained during the grand jury session, now they acted as tormented as usual. To the justices, jurors, and the audience of observers, as Mather reported it, “There was little Occasion to prove the Witchcraft, it being Evident and Notorious to all Beholders.” The question was: How to prove the defendant was responsible for it?

“[T]he first thing used, was the Testimony of the Bewitched,” according to Mather. Several spoke of the spectral attacks that left them bitten, pinched, and choked; others reported specters which pestered them to sign the witches’ book and threatened them if they refused. One of the afflicted told how the defendant’s specter snatched her from her spinning wheel and hauled her to the river and nearly drowned her, how it bragged of other folk already killed, how the ghosts of those murder victims materialized to the afflicted and called for vengeance. While Bridget herself thought her accusers were liars or, at best, the Devil’s dupes, the court found the actions of the afflicted convincing and were impressed by tales of her alleged victims’ ghosts crying, “You Murdered us!”

(Much of this testimony that Mather included obviously refers to Susanna Sheldon’s statements, though the documents have no notation that she had sworn to them. Perhaps she spoke in court—the court heard
viva voce
testimony as well as written—or perhaps the clerk sent Mather copies of
all
the paperwork and Mather only assumed it had all been used in the actual trial. In any case the judges must have been aware of the stories circulating about the Bishop specter.)

Nevertheless, as impressive as the reports of specters and ghosts seemed, the court had to be cautious as to their value. The reports were suspicious, but were they true? A charge of any crime required two credible witnesses to the same act or a confession with supporting evidence.

The judges had consulted standard English works: Richard Bernard’s
Guide to Grand Jurymen . . . in Cases of Witchcraft
(1627), John Gaule’s
Select Cases of Conscience Touching Witches and Witchcrafts
(1646), and William Perkins’s
Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft
(1608).

These three sources drew a distinction between evidence that was suspicious and evidence that proved a point. As Perkins put it, matters of suspicion “give occasion to Examine, yet they are no sufficient Causes of Convicton.” One purpose of all three works was to eliminate “irregular” methods of detecting witches—folk methods and torture.

Swimming a suspected witch or assuming a witch could not weep was mere superstition. It
was
suspicious, however, if a person had a longstanding reputation of being a witch, shared kinship or friendship with a known witch (for the craft could be taught), cursed others (especially if a death or other misfortune followed), had an odd mark possibly made by the Devil, identified another suspect as a fellow witch, and so on.

The best evidence was a full and free confession with some corroborating proof, for, according to Gaule, “
Confessions
without
Fact
may be meer Delusion, and
Fact
without
Confession
may be a meer Accident,” or testimony from two credible witnesses to the same act.

But cases involving evil magic left few clues, as with most poisons, and allowed for more circumstantial evidence. Most of the testimony in cases of supposed witchcraft concerned suspicious activity. Most of the witnesses corroborating the cause of various afflictions were themselves afflicted. Others who had observed an afflicted person’s torments swore to that person’s reactions and statements but did not claim to have seen or experienced what the supposed victim claimed.

The justices had sheaves of notes and depositions from the afflicted and from neighbors, notes from Bridget’s April 19 hearing in Salem Village, and paperwork from the 1680 case that had jailed her but was eventually dismissed. Now she listened to it all over again, all the gossiping fears the neighbors had worked themselves into, all the suspicions that ought to have been settled and explained years beforehand.

She stood at the bar, weighted down by iron shackles until her legs ached while the clerk read the notes and depositions and her neighbors stood under oath and related incidents she found preposterous—things that had happened years ago, incidents from the other day.

Deliverance Hobbs, no longer denying her recantation, testified as a repentant witch and appeared tormented by Bridget’s specter in court. She said that Bridget threatened her with the book and whipped her with iron rods to make her deny her earlier confession and that Bridget partook of the diabolical sacrament at the great witch-meeting in Salem Village.

The other afflicted witnesses, meanwhile, convulsed as they had before, appearing to be knocked down if she only looked at them, as if her eyes gave a spectral blow. The court made Bridget revive them with a touch, noting that only
her
touch worked.

When the clerk read the hearing notes describing how Bridget’s motions affected the afflicted, making them twist about to mirror “some Special Actions of her Body,” she shook her head and turned her eyes away. The afflicted followed that motion too, and one of them, commenting on Bridget’s supposed lack of compassion, said that the defendant “could not be Troubled to see the Afflicted thus Tormented.”

More testimony followed amid all this—old incidents to show intent, character, years of supposed malice. Eighteen-year-old John Cook saw her specter a half dozen years ago grinning at him in his chamber one sunrise before it struck him on the side of his head. Samuel Gray, haunted by her specter fourteen years ago at his bedside in a locked room, felt her trying to put something in his mouth when his “Child in the Cradle gave a great screech out as if it was greatly hurt,” whereupon the specter vanished. Thereafter the baby’s health declined, and in a few months it died. (Gray had sworn to his story on May 30, but the document lacks the notation “Jurat in Curia,” suggesting it may not have been used at the jury trial. However, Cotton Mather saw a copy of it, for he summarized the testimony in his account. Robert Calef, criticizing the trials a few years later, thought that the persistent rumors of Bridget’s association with witchcraft all stemmed from “the Accusations of one Samuel Gray”).

John and Rebecca Bly described the strange fits visited on the sow they bought from Edward Bishop—Bridget’s sow—without her approval. Richard Coman, told how, eight years earlier, her pesky specter stalked him by night, paralyzing him when she appeared in the locked room and began clawing at his throat, pulling him nearly out of bed. Samuel and Sarah Shattuck, twelve years past and already suspicious of her transactions at his dye-works, had encountered not a specter but Bridget herself, whom he blamed for the sudden change in his son, who lost his understanding and continued to be plagued with fits and fancies, a danger to himself and a constant worry to his parents. Doctors deduced witchcraft at work.

Naomi Maule testified in court that Bridget’s evil magic had killed her baby. John Louder—that drunken liar—related his visions of imps and spectral hogs after a quarrel with Bridget when her hens scratched up his employer’s garden behind the Sun Tavern. At this Bridget protested that she did not even know Louder, but the judges did not believe this, for she and Louder had been neighbors for years and had quarreled more than once. (How did Bridget phrase her objection? Or had she not recognized Louder for some reason? The fearful situation of being tried on a capital charge must have quickly turned anxiety to terror, as it became more and more clear that the court believed only her accusers’ tales and did not believe anything she tried to say in her defense.) William Stacy the miller blamed her for miring his cart, told of her specter menacing him at his bedside, of something heaving him against a stone wall one night, and of something causing his infant daughter Priscilla’s untimely death.

John Bly returned with his son William to depose about how, when Bridget had hired them to remove a wall in the cellar “of The owld house she formerly Lived in,” they found poppets walled up in the cellar—actual poppets made of rags and hogs bristles and studded with headless pins points outward. Whatever she said to this did not impress the court but instead sounded merely like a thin excuse. (Had she known the poppets were there, or had they been walled into the building at its construction before Bridget’s occupancy?)

As far as the justices were concerned much of what Bridget said sounded like lies or, at best, contradictions even when making her plea. The apparent witch teat that the jury of matrons found earlier was no help either.

Once all the witnesses had had their say, Bridget’s fate was left to the jury. Perhaps she hoped that the jurors would balance the testimony against the obvious fact that the afflicted, when not convulsing, appeared perfectly well, that their health was not physically damaged as the indictments specified. Although Thomas and Ann Putnam would not have agreed, the fact was certainly evident to others present, such as Boston merchant Thomas Brattle, who noted that the afflicted, though taken by “scores of strange fits in a day,” were otherwise “hale and hearty.”

But Chief Justice Stoughton saw things differently. “[W]hen the chief Judge gave the first Jury their charge,” Brattle would write, “he told them, that they were not to mind whether the bodies of the said afflicted were really pined and consumed, as was expressed in the indictment; but whether the said afflicted did not suffer from the accused such afflictions as naturally
tended
to their being pined and consumed, wasted, etc. This, (said he,) is a pining and consuming in the sense of the law.”