The Witches: Salem, 1692 (54 page)

The homemade walking sticks on which George Jacobs hobbled into court, to inform the justices he was as likely a buzzard as a wizard.
(Peabody Essex Museum)

Pins from the Salem proceedings, where they punctured throats and protruded from arms. They were removed, noted an eyewitness, “by the judges’ own hands.” One was found sticking upright in a victim’s hair; another pierced an enchanted girl’s upper and lower lips, binding them together, leaving her unable to testify.
(Courtesy Danvers Archival Center)

The restored Nurse homestead, where four villagers called on seventy-one-year-old Rebecca in March to break the news that she had been accused of witchcraft. “What sin has God found in me unrepented of that he should lay such an affliction upon me in my old age?” she asked once she had recovered from the shock. She hanged four months later.
(Photograph by Richard B. Trask)

The Salem village meetinghouse, reconstructed in 1985 and in better shape today than it was in 1692. Adolescent girls interrupted both hearings and sermons in the dimly lit 34-by-28-foot structure.
(Photograph by Richard B. Trask)

From the account of a 1621 English case, in which three young women—falling into fits and trances—conversed with dead siblings and specters. Among the accused was an old widow, known to have consorted for over forty years with a spirit in the shape of a great black cat; she appears here with her demon familiar as well. She was acquitted.
(© The British Library Board B20051-69, Add. 32496 f.2)

Increase Mather, Cotton’s father, Harvard’s president and New England’s most eminent minister. The portrait dates from 1688, four years after the publication of
Illustrious Providences,
a treasure trove of shipwrecks, portents, tempests, and possessions collected to political end. Those oddities proved New Englanders to be a chosen people on an exceptional mission.
(American Antiquarian Society)

Cotton Mather, later in life. Although largely absent from Salem, the twenty-nine-year-old minister wrote himself into the story; no one in Massachusetts poked as insistently into and around the subject of witchcraft. Nor did anyone offer such contradictory opinions. In June, Mather advised the court to exercise “very critical and exquisite caution,” five paragraphs later endorsing a “speedy and vigorous prosecution.”
(American Antiquarian Society)

The Salem town jail keep’s December 1693 accounting. A New England prisoner paid for his provisions, hay, and shackles; to the costs for having kept Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, Giles Corey, and his other prisoners, William Dounton added his salary, only partially paid since the Andros administration. The forty-pound total was nearly what a minister earned in a year. A prison could be built for the sum.
(MSS 401, Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum)

William Stoughton, the starchy chief justice and Harvard benefactor, among the most eminent of New England legal authorities. The survivor of four previous Massachusetts administrations, Stoughton also served as deputy governor in 1692.
(Harvard Art Museums
/
Fogg Museum, H37)

Samuel Sewall as he appeared in 1729, thirty-two years after he publicly repented for his role on the Salem court. Eager for political stability and intent on consensus, Sewell tripped occasionally over his conscience.
(Peabody Essex Museum)

Samuel Willard, the Boston minister who tactfully deviated from his colleagues. Satan could work his evil without entering into a formal pact with an accomplice; he could assume “the image of any man in the world.” A generation earlier, Willard had conversed with the devil through a possessed sixteen-year-old servant girl.
(Harvard Art Museums
/
Fogg Museum, H18)