03: Under An Evil Hand

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A PRODUCT OF THE WHISPERFORGE: SOUND & STORY, BROUGHT TO LIFE

[[MUSIC: “Lakeside Path” by Blue Dot Sessions]]

KATE: Hello, and welcome to Remarkable Providences: a podcast about adolescence and afflictions, fungi and Freud, and of course, the Salem Witch Trials. I’m your tour guide, Kate Devorak. 

Last week, we began with an introduction to Salem Village, a suburb of the port town of Salem, located on the coast of modern day eastern Massachusetts, in particular how petty divisions amongst the village residents ultimately led to the hiring and ordination of a human disaster named Samuel Parris as their parish’s minister. Today, I’ll be talking about the events leading up to the arrests that would kick off an 8 month witch frenzy that would result in the deaths of 25 people, the accepted inciting incident, and how this was something that the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony had seen before. Let’s get into it.

Things were not going well for Samuel Parris. 

[[MUSIC: Tense.]]

The reverend of Salem Village was starved for income and firewood during a punishing New England winter, locked in a bitter struggle with equally-desperate villagers, with little but his own boundless stubbornness to keep the cold at bay. His family unit–consisting of his wife, Elizabeth, his children Betty, Thomas, and Susanna, his niece Abigail, and the family’s slaves, a married couple named Tituba and John Indian–were holed up in the Village parsonage, which was the only thing anchoring the Parrises to the community.

As we covered in last week’s episode, many of the residents of Salem Village, specifically the Village committee majority, were at the end of their ropes with Samuel Parris. Unable to fire him after they had given him the deed to the parsonage and the surrounding land in an act of desperation back in 1689, they were instead attempting to force him out by refusing to pay his salary and, most importantly, the firewood Parris had demanded in his initial contract. Firewood was essential for survival in Massachusetts. Winter in New England can be absolutely brutal, as any northerner will gladly tell you. How could things possibly get worse? 

[[Music continues.]]

Well, it got worse in early 1692. The oldest two girls in the Parris household, Betty Parris, age 9, and Abigail Williams, age 11, began to suffer from strange fits. They would cry and scream, flailing their arms and legs wildly. Or they would bark like dogs, or contort their bodies into unnatural positions they claimed to be unable to get out of. Sometimes they would sit completely still for hours, unable to move, speak, or hear. Other times they claimed to feel pins stuck into their skin or become transfixed by things that were not there. According to later (albeit coerced) testimony, the fits started in mid-January, though they don’t seem to be reported in earnest until early February. 

These fits or symptoms are often referred to as “afflictions” in written records, and those who suffer from them the “afflicted”, so I will also be calling them that throughout the series. I want to use that broader term because a lot of books and records and tours (like the ones I guided) refer to the main group of accusers as “the afflicted girls”, which is a) pretty unfair to the complexities of the whole situation, b) kinda sexist, and c) not 100% accurate. There is a core group who will appear in court transcripts over and over again that is made up primarily by girls in their early-to-late-teens, who would provide some of the more dramatic testimony in the form of group afflictions, and these names will appear on many of the arrest warrants.

But there were still more people, including adult women and some men, who would come forward with complaints of being actively bewitched or with reports of prior afflictions. Some of these folks never formally appeared in court, or only showed up to give testimony for a few cases, while others would periodically take part in the group afflictions. It takes a village to hang a person, you know.

[[MUSIC: Reflective.]]

What exactly started it is a matter of great debate. Some say that it happened one winter day with a simple English fortune telling game. The idea was to take an egg, break it into a glass of water, and observe the shapes that formed. From that, it was believed, a girl could divine the occupation of her future husband. As two girls huddled around one such glass, they were horrified to see the shape of a coffin take form–a sure sign of death. Others say it was the overactive imaginations of two children, spurred on by the tales of their enslaved caretaker. Or could it be something akin to a bad acid trip, a result of eating moldy wheat? A bout of good old fashioned Freudian hysteria? A joke gone on too far? Or maybe some form of epilepsy?

Maybe it was just stress. The incredible stress of being a child in a strange, isolated world, where there were very few prospects for girls, and people believed the devil lurked behind every tree. Of being in a small, dark, cold house, in the dead of the New England winter, with dwindling resources, and, if the family patriarch was to be believed, surrounded not by neighbors, but by enemies. 

Let’s take a second to break these down. 

[[Music continues.]]

If you’ve ever been on a tour in Salem, or have done a bit of digging into the witch trials, you may have heard the story of the Venus glass–the egg divination game. When I worked as a tour guide in Salem, I heard it a lot. A couple of my former co-workers use it in their tours, and I’ll admit, I also used it as an opener for mine for a season or two. It’s a cool story. It’s got romance, death, intrigue, lite witchy stuff, eggs. That’s a recipe that’ll grab an audience. It doesn’t immediately try to blame Tituba, which is always a win in my book. And it’s also pretty relatable. For me, it conjures memories of playing MASH or making cootie catchers with the girls in the neighborhood after school.

Unfortunately, it’s not totally true. This particular tale comes to us from John Hale, the minister of the neighboring town of Beverly, who played an active role in the witch trials… until his wife was accused, after which he put an end to the witch hunt in Beverly. Great guy, as long as you’re personally threatening his wife. 

In his 1697 account of the trials, Modest Inquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft, he recounts the story of one of the afflicted girls:

“I knew one of the afflicted persons, who (as I was credibly informed) did try with an egg and a glass to find her husband’s calling; till there came up a coffin, that is, a specter in likeness of a coffin. And she was afterwards followed with diabolical molestation to her death; and so died a single person.”

Some folks have suggested that the girl in the story is Abigail Williams, since she disappears from historical record in mid-1692, but I’d say it’s unlikely. First of all, the account mentions only one girl, not two as would have been the case in the Parris household. Secondly, you would think that, propriety or no, Hale would have name-checked Betty and Abigail given their infamy as the first afflicted, but he remains vague in the account. Thirdly, what the heck does “I was credibly informed” even mean here? He’s getting this story from an unnamed third party, and not to be too temporally chauvinistic, a good majority of these folks thought that a four year old saying that her mom was a witch and had a pet snake that nobody else could see was “credible information”. While some forms of fortune telling were practiced, and were viewed by the Puritans with the same kind of unease that people in ghost hunter shows have with Ouija boards, we can’t say for sure that Betty and Abigail would have played these kinds of games, so there’s one hypothesis down. 

[[MUSIC: Somber.]]

As for the idea that Tituba could have triggered this whole incident–nope, nope, no, we are not doing that, ok? Tituba did nothing wrong, and that is the hill I’m choosing to die on. This one is incredibly popular for a couple of not-awesome reasons. It comes from a long tradition of people having a loose grasp of the world these girls were living in and wanting to place the blame on one person or event, and Tituba is an easy target mostly because she was the children’s primary caretaker and as an enslaved woman of color, she is the most obviously identifiable “other” in the situation. She isn’t white, she is not from a Puritan society, English is not her first language, and because of this, she is far, far too often unfairly singled out as the corrupting factor.

The assumptions vary from the insidious to the unfortunately unaware. I’ve heard people talk about how Tituba was a voodoo priestess who actively involved Betty and Abigail in various rituals and/or fortune telling ventures, or about how she was fueling the girls’ imaginations with stories of magic from Barbados. We have no evidence that points to any of that. Of all the people in Samuel Parris’s unhappy home, Tituba probably wanted to be there the least.The image of her as a mambo, or voodoo priestess, was largely popularized by Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, which is pretty loosey goosey with historical fact, and has become ingrained in popular culture as most folks’ gateway to the trials. 

Unfortunately, given her status as an enslaved woman of color–or as the Puritans might see it, a triple threat–we don’t have that much information about Tituba’s life outside of the court records. Who she was, where she came from, what she may or may not have told the Parris children, and what she personally believed in is all a mystery. There are theories and assumptions we can make based on historical context, which we will get into in a future episode focusing on Tituba. But keeping it brief for now: there is no evidence pointing to her as the catalyst for Betty and Abigail’s fits, besides the fact that she was the first person accused and that she admitted to being a witch in her initial testimony, which was, again, obviously coerced and closely followed Puritan beliefs on witchcraft. 

And then there’s the ergot theory. Oh, the ergot theory. 

[[MUSIC: Quirky.]]

I used to get this one a lot from tourists who saw a History Channel special and wanted to sound smart. Good news: you do sound smart. Bad news: it's a bunch of baloney. The ergot theory asserts that the wheat crop was contaminated by Claviceps purpurea, a fungus that can cause hallucinations and convulsions when consumed by humans.

I’ve often heard it described like tripping face on LSD. Which is frankly hilarious to me. Folks on my tours would pitch this theory, and I always wanted to shoot back something like, “I don’t know if you’ve ever dropped acid, Kevin, but I have, and it took me over a full hour of real time to make an online burrito order because I forgot how money worked, nevermind try to orchestrate a strategic, 8-month societal purge.” But, you know, there’s a time and place for that.

That place apparently being a podcast that several of my friends and family will listen to. Sorry, mom. 

Besides the challenges of doing much of anything while high on hallucinogens, there are several other holes in this theory. It was first put forward in a 1976 article published in Science magazine by Linnda Caporael. According to Caporael, several symptoms claimed by the afflicted were in line with those of ergot poisoning: namely the hallucinations, muscle spasms, vertigo, and the sensation of pins and needles or crawling on the skin. The weather conditions recorded for that year–an especially cold winter followed by a wet spring–were apparently ideal for ergot growth, especially in the swampy western part of Salem Village, where many of the afflicted accusers lived. Which sounds pretty compelling, but look a little deeper into ergotism, and the whole thing quickly falls apart.

The first thing that stands out to me (and several critics of this theory) is that if the Village’s wheat crop had been contaminated by the fungus, why were only a handful of people affected? And why were so few adult men affected? One would think that if everyone is eating this moldy bread, that symptoms would appear across the board instead of seeming to target primarily young girls and women. While ergot poisoning is more common in young children, the majority of accusers were in their teens or older. In the case of the Parris household, Betty and Abigail were both under 13, but neither of Betty’s younger siblings were afflicted, which doesn’t add up if they’re all supposedly poisoned. Also, as the trials progressed and spread further out of Salem Village, we start to get people from towns outside of Salem experiencing the same afflictions as the Village accusers. Which would mean that all of these towns, running along eastern Massachusetts, had contaminated crops. Not super likely. 

Then there’s the lack of other symptoms. Vomiting and diarrhea are also present in convulsive ergotism, though neither are mentioned in surviving documents. Untreated ergot poisoning over such an extended period as the afflicted would have experienced would also have resulted in gangrene or permanent neurological damage, which again, was not reported. Several contemporary accounts of the trials also note that the accusers appeared perfectly healthy outside of their fits, as though a switch was flipped to turn the afflictions on and off. As we’ll see later in the court transcripts, the accusers’ afflictions appear more deliberate and choreographed than would have been possible if they were suffering from convulsive ergotism. 

Turning now to possible psychological causes, I’ll allow Freud for consideration, but he’s on freaking thin ice. Yup, this is the clinical mass hysteria bit all the hip historians are talking about. Because the term “hysteria” is kinda outdated, inaccurate, and pretty sexist, I’m going to switch over to the technical terms “conversion disorder” and “mass psychogenic illness” for individual and group cases, respectively. The idea behind conversion disorder is that when difficult emotions are repressed following a painful experience or traumatic event, that anxiety can be converted into physical ailments, such as fits, loss of one or more senses, tics, and other bouts of strange behavior. Mass psychogenic illness more or less refers to conversion disorder on a larger scale: an illness or collection of physical symptoms that spread through a population with no organic cause. Instances of mass psychogenic illness tend to occur in societies under a great deal of stress with the participants being predominantly female. Conversion disorder was first studied as a psychological disorder in the late 1800s, famously by Sigmund Freud, who is a controversial figure for many reasons that I don’t have time to get into here, but know I do take much of his work with a heaping tablespoon of salt.

Psychologist Pierre Janet, a contemporary of Freud, also wrote about conversion disorder, though he argued that it was more a result of the power of suggestion in people prone to dissociation, or a distancing from reality often as the result of stress or trauma. If you do any reading on the Salem witch trials, conversion disorder always pops up. It makes a certain kind of sense, as the community in question was under a great deal of stress on pretty much every level, and many of the afflicted were women. But also conversion disorder isn’t super well understood, even today, and it seems difficult to diagnose. It is clear that stress and suggestion definitely play a part in the spread of afflictions as the trials progress, but I wouldn’t feel right calling it a bout of mass hysteria and moving on. 

[[MUSIC: Reflective.]]

That kind of takes responsibility away from the society at large (and by society, I mean the conditions put in place by those in power–i.e., the men), which definitely stoked this flame throughout. Also, as with my criticism of the ergot theory, some of these conditions seem too calculated to be chalked up to an illness the afflicted had no control over. Once the trouble leaves the Parris household, you can start to see a significance as to who is afflicted when, and then there’s the fact that many of the afflicted showed no symptoms outside of the courtroom, and that much of the trial testimony appears to be choreographed. 

Now, I don’t want to rule out any kind of legitimate mental illness or other medical conditions for some of the afflicted. There is evidence that a few of the accusers suffered from conditions that the Puritans just didn’t have names for yet, like PTSD or sleep paralysis. And at this point, we’re starting with two afflicted girls. By the end of the trials, over seventy people would claim to have suffered from either a physical affliction or a supposed spiritual attack on their families or property. We’re not going to find a “one size fits all” solution, especially once the trials start to pick up speed.

If you ask me–and you’ve tuned into this podcast, so you basically have–as a whole, the afflictions and their spread boil down to a mix of anxiety and conspiracy, stemming from a society on edge and egged on by bad actors looking to exploit that. But we’ll get there.

At the end of the day, we’ll never know definitively what happened with Betty and Abigail. And I don’t think it matters all that much. Kids do weird shit all the time. It’s how the adults react that’s important. Something to keep in mind as we go further: the majority of the afflicted accusers were children and young women, who had no legal standing in this society. They could not have been taken seriously without a male representative to press charges. 

But we’re looking at the situation with a 21st century perspective. Let’s strap on our 17th century bonnets, and we’ll be able to see these symptoms for what they obviously are, as a Village doctor, traditionally identified as Dr. William Griggs, would eventually diagnose: the girls were “under an evil hand”. At this point I can just picture Samuel Parris putting his head in his hands like “God damn it”. Of the things the reverend did NOT need right now, this would have been pretty high on that list. His daughter and his niece were bewitched.

[[MUSIC: “Our Names Engraved” by Blue Dot Sessions]]

Remarkable Providences was written, researched, and performed by me, Kate Devorak. It was produced by Dan Manning, and recorded by Chad Ellis. Our music is from Blue Dot Sessions. Find us on Twitter @RemarkablePod, and everywhere else @RemarkableProvidences. For transcripts and links to everything, visit us at whisperforge.org/remarkableprovidences

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Thanks for listening, and remember, the devil’s in the details.