One freezing day in January of 1692, something

strange happened inside the Parris household of Salem Village, Massachusetts. As sleet and snow heaped higher outside their door, Betty Parris and her cousin Abigail began to twitch and twist their bodies into strange shapes, speaking in words that made no sense. Betty’s alarmed father, the Reverend Parris, immediately called on a doctor to examine the girls. The doctor’s diagnosis? The pair had been bewitched. WITCH HUNT

At the time, Salem Village was a small New England town populated mostly by Puritans, or religious individuals with a belief in the devil. The Puritan way of life was strict, and even small differences in behavior made people suspicious. Upon hearing about the Parris girls’ behavior, much of the Puritan community agreed that the duo had been victims of witchcraft.

When asked who had done this to them, Betty and Abigail blamed three townswomen, including Tituba, a Native American slave who worked in the Parris household. Tituba was known to have played fortune-telling games, which were strictly forbidden by the Puritans. The other two accused women, Sarah Good and Sarah Osbourne, weren’t well liked by the community either. ON TRIAL

The three women were thrown in jail to await trial for practicing witchcraft. During the trial, Tituba confessed to having seen the devil and also stated that there was a coven, or group, of witches in the Salem Village area. Good and Osbourne insisted they were innocent. The court didn’t believe them, and found all three women guilty of practicing witchcraft. The punishment was hanging.

As the weeks passed, other young girls claimed to have been infected by witchcraft too. They accused other townspeople of torturing them, and a few of the so-called witches on trial even named others as witches.

Women were not the only ones believed to be witches—men and children were accused too. By the end of the trials in 1693, 24 people had died, some in jail but most by hanging.

THE HYSTERIA FADES Eventually, after seeming to realize how unfair the

trials were to the accused, the court refused to hear any more charges of witchcraft. All of the accused were finally pardoned in 1711.

No one’s really sure why the witch craze spread the way it did, but it brought lasting changes to the United States legal system and the way evidence and witnesses were treated. The Salem Village hangings were the last executions of accused witches in the United States.

Map of Salem Village

http://kids.nationalgeographic.com/explore/history/salem-witch-trials/

THE SALEM WITCH TRIALS

George Burroughs, a minister and one of the few men accused of

witchcraft during the trials, speaking at Witches Hill, the site of his execution.

http://sheg.stanford.edu

Chart of Family Farms

Salem Village (on the left/west) and Salem Town (on the right/east). Most people in Salem Village were farmers, whereas most people in Salem Town were merchants and townspeople. The residents of Salem Village had to pay taxes to Salem Town. The map shows that most of the people who made accusations were from Salem Village.

“Author’s Note”

from A Break with Charity: A Story about the Salem Witch Trials

by Ann Rinaldi

The central figure in this 1876 illustration of the courtroom is usually identified as Mary Walcott, 17, one of several girls in Salem with a psychological disorder known as mass hysteria, and whose condition was blamed on witchcraft.

https://www.livescience.com/19820-salem-witch-trials.html

Did Cold Weather Cause the Salem Witch Trials? by Natalie Wolchover

Historical records indicate that, worldwide, witch hunts occur more often during cold periods, possibly because people look for scapegoats to blame for crop failures and general economic hardship. Fitting the pattern, scholars argue that cold weather may have spurred the infamous Salem witch trials in 1692.

The theory, first laid out by the economist Emily Oster in her senior thesis at Harvard University eight years ago, holds that the most active era of witchcraft trials in Europe coincided with a 400- year period of lower-than-average temperature known to climatologists as the "little ice age." Oster, now an associate professor of economics at the University of Chicago, showed that as the climate varied from year to year during this cold period, lower temperatures correlated with higher numbers of witchcraft accusations.

The correlation may not be surprising, Oster argued, in light of textual evidence from the period: popes and scholars alike clearly believed witches were capable of controlling the weather, and therefore, crippling food production.

The Salem witch trials fell within an extreme cold spell that lasted from 1680 and 1730—one of the chilliest segments of the little ice age. The notion that weather may have instigated those trials is being revived by Salem State University historian Tad Baker in his forthcoming book, "A Storm of Witchcraft" (Oxford University Press, 2013). Building on Oster's thesis, Baker has found clues in diaries and sermons that suggest a harsh New England winter really may have set the stage for accusations of witchcraft.

According to the Salem News, one clue is a document that mentions a key player in the Salem drama, Rev. Samuel Parris, whose daughter Betty was the first to become ill in the winter of 1691-1692 because of supposed witchcraft. In that document, "Rev. Parris is arguing with his parish over the wood supply," Baker said. A winter fuel shortage would have made for a fairly miserable colonial home, and "the higher the misery quotient, the more likely you are to be seeing witches."

…Weather patterns continue to trigger witchcraft accusations in many parts of Africa, where witch killings persist. According to a 2003 analysis by the Berkeley economist Edward Miguel, extreme rainfall — either too much or too little — coincides with a significant increase in the number of witch killings in Tanzania. The victim is typically the oldest woman in a household, killed by her own family.

from Wicked Plants by Amy Stewart

Historians still wonder what caused the bizarre behavior that led eight young girls to be suspected of demonic possession and witchcraft during the winter of 1691 in Salem, Massachusetts. One girl after another went into convulsions, babbled incoherently, and complained of creepy skin sensations. Doctors could find nothing wrong with them, and the best explanation medical science had to offer was that a witch cast a spell over the girls.

Almost three hundred years later, a researcher had another idea. Ergot, the toxic fungus that infects rye and contaminates bread, could explain the girls’ bizarre behavior.

Ergot is a parasitic fungus that attaches itself to a flowering cereal grass like rye or wheat. It flourished in damp conditions and possesses the special trick of being able to mimic the very grain it has infected. It forms a hardened mass called a sclerotium on its host and can nurture dormant spores until the conditions are just right to release them. Millions of ergot spores can be harvested right along with a rye or wheat crop, and the bread produced from those grains can contain enough of the fungus to infect whoever eats it—including some young girls living in Salem during a particularly damp winter.

The alkaloids in ergot constrict blood vessels, causing seizures, nausea… and eventually gangrene and death… Hysteria, hallucinations, and a feeling that something is crawling on the skin are all signs of ergot poisoning.

Records going back to the Middle Ages show that from time to time, and entire village would succumb to mysterious illness. Villagers would dance in the streets, go into convulsions, and eventually collapse…

The relationship between these strange behaviors and ergot infestation had only just been discovered in Europe when the Salem witch trials began, but it is unlikely that news of this breakthrough would have reached the colonies. Eventually nineteen people went to the gallows for the crime of casting spells on the girls. They protested their innocence all the way.

If only someone has thought to question the town baker. Judging from weather records, crop reports, the girls’ symptoms, and the fact that the hysteria stopped almost as abruptly as it started, it is entirely possible that the whole event was caused by an outbreak of ergot brought on by an unusually wet winter…