![]() ![]() (Ergot is caused by a fungus which invades developing kernels of rye grain, especially under warm and damp conditions such as existed at the time of the previous rye harvest in Salem. (The symptoms also could have been caused, as Linda Caporael argued in a 1976 article in Science magazine, by a disease called "convulsive ergotism" brought on by ingesting rye-eaten as a cereal and as a common ingredient of bread-infected with ergot. The cause of her symptoms may have been some combination of stress, asthma, guilt, boredom, child abuse, epilepsy, and delusional psychosis. In one moment that must have shocked her father, she threw a Bible across a room. She dashed about, dove under furniture, contorted in pain, barked like a dog, fell dumb, babbled nonsensically, and complained of fever. ![]() Sometime during February of the exceptionally cold winter of 1692, young Betty Parris became strangely ill. The Salem that became the new home of Parris was in the midst of change: a mercantile elite was beginning to develop, prominent people were becoming less willing to assume positions as town leaders, two clans (the Putnams and the Porters) were competing for control of the village and its pulpit, and a debate was raging over how independent Salem Village, tied more to the interior agricultural regions, should be from Salem, a center of sea trade. He moved to Salem Village with his wife Elizabeth, his six-year-old daughter Betty, niece Abigail Williams, and his Indian slave Tituba, acquired by Parris in Barbados. Salem witch trials free#A year later, after negotiations over salary, inflation adjustments, and free firewood, Parris accepted the job as Village minister. In 1688, John Putnam, one of the most influential elders of Salem Village, invited Samuel Parris, formerly a marginally successful planter and merchant in Barbados, to preach in the Village church. Only an unfortunate combination of an ongoing frontier war, economic conditions, congregational strife, teenage boredom, and personal jealousies can account for the spiraling accusations, trials, and executions that occurred in the spring and summer of 1692. Why did this travesty of justice occur? Why did it occur in Salem? Nothing about this tragedy was inevitable. Then, almost as soon as it had begun, the hysteria that swept through Puritan Massachusetts ended. Dozens languished in jail for months without trials. Hundreds of others faced accusations of witchcraft. Salem witch trials trial#Another man of over eighty years was pressed to death under heavy stones for refusing to submit to a trial on witchcraft charges. Words written by John Greenleaf Whittier and inscribed on a monument marking the grave of Rebecca Nurse, one of the condemned "witches" of Salem.įrom June through September of 1692, nineteen men and women, all having been convicted of witchcraft, were carted to Gallows Hill, a barren slope near Salem Village, for hanging. ![]()
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