Real Crime Stories/Paranormal Hauntings

The Salem Witch Trials (Part 3)

Tituba's race is described as Carib-Indian or African descent, but contemporary sources say she is an "Indian". Researcher Elaine Breslaw suggests Tituba may have been captured in Venezuela and brought to Barbados, making her an Arawak Indian. Gov. Thomas Hutchinson, in writing his history of Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 18th century, describe her as a "Spanish Indian." During this day, this meant a Native American from the Carolinas/Georgia/Florida.

Touch Test

An infamous application of the belief in effluvia was the touch test used in Andover during preliminary examinations in September 1692. Despite Parris explicitly warning his congregations against using this examination, but supposedly if the accused witch touched the victim while the victim was having a fit, and the fit stopped, observers believed it meant the accused was the person who afflicted the victim. Several of those accused later recounted:

"...we were blindfolded, and our hands were laid upon the afflicted persons, they being in their fits and falling into their fits at our coming into their presence, as they said. Some led us and laid our hands upon them, and then they said they were well and that we were guilty of afflicting them; whereupon we were all seized, as prisoners, by a warrant from the justice of the peace and forthwith carried to Salem."

The Rev. John Hale explained how it worked: "the Witch by the cast of her eye sends forth a Malefick Venome into the Bewitched to cast him into a fit, and therefore the touch of the hand doth by sympathy cause that venome to return into the Body of the Witch again".

Other Evidence

Other evidence included confessions of the accused; testimony by a confessed witch who identified others as witches; the discovery of poppits (poppets), books of palmistry and horoscopes, or pots of ointments in the possession or home of the accused; and observation of what were called witch's teats on the body of the accused. A witch's teat is a mole or blemish anywhere on the body insensitive to touch; this discovery of insensitive areas was considered de facto evidence of witchcraft.

Contemporary Commentary on the Trials

Several accounts about the Salem witch trials started being published in 1692. Deodat Lawson, a former minister in Salem Village, visited Salem Village in March and April 1692, and later that year published his own account of what he saw and heard, titled, "A Brief and True Narrative of Some Remarkable Passages Relating to Sundry Persons Afflicted by Witchcraft, at Salem Village: Which Happened from the Nineteenth of March, to the Fifth of April, 1692."

Rev. William Millbourne, a Baptist minister in Boston, publicly petitioned the General Assembly early June 1692, challenging the use of spectral evidence by the Court. Milbourne had to post £200 bond (equal to £30,754, or $42,000 USD today) or be arrested for "contriving, writing and publishing the said scandalous Papers".

On June 15, 1692, twelve local ministers—including Increase Mather and Samuel Willard—submitted "The Return of Several Ministers" to the Governor and Council in Boston, cautioning the authorities not to rely on the use of spectral evidence:

"Presumptions whereupon persons may be Committed, and much more, Convictions whereupon persons may be Condemned as Guilty of Witchcrafts, ought certainly to be more considerable, than barely the Accused Persons being Represented by a Spectre unto the Afflicted."

Sometime in 1692, minister of the Third Church o Boston, Samuel Willard anonymously published a short tract in Philadelphia titled, "Some Miscellany Observations On Our Present Debates Respecting Witchcrafts, in a Dialogue Between S & B." The authors were listed as "P.E and J.A." (Philip English and John Alden), but the work is attributed to Willard. In it, two characters, S (Salem) and B (Boston), discuss the proceedings were conducted, with "B" urging caution about the use of testimony from the afflicted and the confessors, stating, "whatever comes from them is to be suspected; and it is dangerous using or crediting the too far".

Sometime in September 1692, Governor Phips requested Cotton Mather to write the "Wonders of the Invisible World: Being an Account of the Tryals of Several Witches, Lately Executed in New-England," as a defense of the trials, to "help very much flatten that fury which we now so much turn upon one another". Published in Boston and London in 1692, but dated 1693, the introductory letter of endorsements by William Stoughton, Chief Magistrate. The material is taken directly from court records, supplied to Mather by Stephen Sewall, his friend and Clerk of the Court.

Mather's father, Increase Mather, published "Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits", dated October 3, 1692, after the last trials by the Court of Oyer and Terminer. (The title page mistakenly lists the publication year as "1693".) Increase Mather repeats his caution about the reliance on spectral evidence, stating "It were better that Ten Suspected Witches should escape, than that one Innocent Person should be Condemned". Second and third editions were published in Boston and London in 1693. The third edition included Lawson's Narrative and the anonymous "A Further Account of the Tryals of the New-England Witches", sent in a Letter from thence, to a Gentleman in London.