Real Crime Stories/Paranormal Hauntings

The Salem Witch Trials (Part 3)

Cotton Mather's "The Wonders of the Invisible World was written to show how careful the court managed the trials. But the work did not get released until after the trials were ended. Mather explained how he felt spectral evidence was presumptive and didn't stand alone to warrant conviction. Robert Calef, a strong critic against Cotton Mather, stated in his own book "More Wonders of the Invisible World" that by confessing an accused would not be brought to trial, such in the cases of Tituba and Dorcas Good.

Increase Mather as well as other ministers sent letters to the Court, "The Return of Several Ministers Consulted", urging magistrates not to convict on spectral evidence alone. (The court later ruled that spectral evidence was inadmissible, causing a dramatic reduction in convictions and hastening an end to the trials.) A copy of this letter was printed in Increase Mather's "Cases of Conscience," which was published in 1693. The publication, "A Tryal of Witches," relating to the 1662 Bury St Edmunds witch trial, was used by magistrates at Salem as precedent in allowing spectral evidence. Jurist Sir Matthew Hale permitted this evidence, supporting the eminent philosopher, physician and author Thomas Browne, to be used in the Bury St Edmund witch trial and the accusations against two Lowestoft women, the colonial magistrates accepted its validity and the trials proceeded.

Witch Cake

Sometime around February 1692, possibly before specific names were mentioned, a neighbor of Rev. Parris, Mary Sibly (or Sibly, aunt of Mary Walcott). Instructed John Indian, one of the minister's slaves, to make a witch cake. She intended to use traditional English white magic to find the identity of the witch afflicting the girls. The cake, made from rye meal and urine from the afflicted girls, was fed to a dog.

According to English folk understanding of how witches accomplished affliction, when a dog ate the cake, the witch herself would be hurt. Invisible particles she had sent to afflict the girls were believed to remain in the girls' urine, and a woman's cries of pain when a dog ate the cake would identify her as the witch. This superstition was based on Cartesian "Doctrine of Effluvia," which posited that witches afflicted others by the use of "venomous and malignant particles, that were ejected from the eye", according to the October 8, 1692 letter of Thomas Brattle, a contemporary critic of the witch trials.

Records of Salem Village Church show Parris spoke with Sibly (or Sibley) privately on March 25, 1692 about her "grand error" and accepted her "sorrowful confession." In his Sunday sermon to his congregation on March 27 addressed the subject of "calamities" that had begun in his household, but stated, "it never brake forth to any considerable light, until diabolical means were used, by the making of a cake by my Indian man, who had his direction from this our sister, Mary Sibly." He admonished his congregation against the use of any kind of magic, even white magic, because it was essentially, "going to the Devil for help against the Devil." Mary Sibly (or Sibley) publicly acknowledged the "error" of her actions before the congregation, and a show of hands voted that they were satisfied with her admission.

Other instances appear in the records demonstrating a belief by members of the communicating in this effluvia as legitimate evidence. Two statements against Elizabeth Howe included accounts of people suggesting that an ear be cut off and burned from two different animals which Howe was thought to have afflicted, proving she was the one who had bewitched them to death.

Traditionally, the afflicted girls are said to have been entertained by Parris' slave, Tituba, as she allegedly taught them about voodoo in the parsonage kitchen in early 1692, (despite there being no evidence to support this). A variety of secondary sources, starting with Charles W. Upham in the 19th century, relate that a circle of girls, with Tituba's help, tried their hands at fortune telling. They used the white of an egg and a mirror to create a primitive crystal ball to divine the professions of their future spouses and scared one another when supposedly saw the shape of a coffin. The story comes from John Hale's book about the trials, but his version only states that only one girl actually tried this, an Hale doesn't mention Tituba as having any part of this, nor did he identify when the incident took place. Tituba's pre-trial examination gives an energetic confession as she speaks before the court, "creatures who inhabit the invisible world," and "the dark rituals which bind them together in service of Satan", implicating both Good and Osborne while asserting that "many other people in the colony engaged in the devil's conspiracy against the Bay."