Starting out in a town and a village, the Salem Witch Trials are still talked of through creepy and mysterious tales amongst people; even after over 330 years from the events taking place.
The background of the trials start in Salem Village, today’s Danvers and Salem, in Massachusetts Bay Colony. The place was the perfect fit for a horror story: rural and half-secluded, with social tensions and religious pressure at an all-time high, with economical struggles putting everyone on edge. Looking back at the era’s conditions, it had been made illegal by law to perform witchcraft, setting the foundations of the alibis to the executions. But it took the combination of multiple factors – such as the legal shortcomings, mass hysteria, religious and societal puritan movements and political instability – for one of the most sick and unjust acts of innocent executions in history to take place.
The trials came to be when a bunch of young girls, two of them being Betty Parris and Abigail Williams, started having seizure-like convulsions, fits along with what were possibly fever dreams and were diagnosed to have been “bewitched”. Some women in the community were accused of committing witchcraft on the girls, and thus started the Salem Witch Trials.
With the accusations and blaming spreading like wildfire in the rural village, with the religious higher-ups giving judgment over the townsfolk, the majority of their victims being women, especially ones that could be easy targets. The first three people to ever have been judged and accused in the trials were basically outcasts with no powerful or nobel background nor money that could buy them respect and a chance to live: the first was Bridget Bishop, a widow that people said had harmed her past husbands; Sarah Good, whose family was nowhere near well-of in terms of money and whose own child was forced to testify against her and Rebecca Nurse, who was killed at the age of 71 when she was already bedridden for quite a time after some people claimed they were tortured by her and her words were misinterpreted and used against her. These people weren’t huge on going to church either, which most definitely had a helping hand in the causing of their unjust demises. As the hysteria kept spreading over the whole town, more people were imprisoned, tortured and 17 more people were killed in unjust and cruel ways.
All the trials of the jailed and murdered were biased beyond belief and were completely in favor of the wishes and selfish wants of the Church and their supporters. The interrogation of their “suspects” were inhumane and torturous, with no legal representation even offered to them, let alone any good ones. In total, 20 people with 6 men and 14 women of varying ages were executed mostly by hanging, an 81 year old man named Giles Corey died a gruesome death getting crushed under rocks after denying a want of the church, and more people died imprisoned mostly because of the harsh conditions and treatment of their jailors.
The trials that had started in the February of 1692 started to slow down in, eerily enough, the autumn of the same year when a governor decided to interfere and dismantle the council that had conducted the trials and executions before freeing the remaining prisoners. While the death of more innocent people was avoided, 25 souls, men women and children alike, have been lost to the executions and the treatment while in custody.
So, despite dying out quick, the aftermath of the Salem Witch Trials came harder than just 25 deaths as a number. There were changes made in the legal system following the dismantling of the council, but it still left broken apart families and a town that would never really heal in hindsight. Moreover, the trials show just how much the power of authority can be abused and blatantly used for wrong if they have enough supporters and people that they see as societal burdens or objects of distrust that they want to get rid of; the inequality of women being accused of performing “harmful witchcraft” way more than man ever have speaks for itself as another topic. It shows us how intolerance to anyone that’s different than the ones in power gets treated and overall, still stands as something that is haunting the world of today with its cruelty. It stands as a warning, to those who are still in danger of many kinds for being nothing but different.
