The Salem Witch Trials

Salem Village, January 1692. Nine-year-old Betty Parris and her eleven-year-old cousin Abigail Williams lived in the home of the village minister, Samuel Parris. That winter the girls began screaming, contorting their bodies, and uttering words no one could understand. They threw objects across the room and made sounds like barking dogs. Dr. William Griggs, the local physician, examined them and found nothing wrong with their bodies. He concluded the girls were bewitched. Not long before the fits started, Betty and Abigail had been experimenting with a folk fortune-telling trick, dropping egg white into a glass of water to read shapes in it, a device called a venus glass. Reverend John Hale later wrote that the girls saw the shape of a coffin form in the glass. Word of the affliction spread through the household and then the village. Soon Ann Putnam Jr. and Elizabeth Hubbard, a teenage orphan living in Dr. Griggs's own household, began fitting the same way. By March, Mercy Lewis and Mary Walcott had joined them too, and the circle of afflicted girls had grown to six and more, each mirroring the same screaming and contorting in front of neighbors who had no explanation for it. Betty's parents eventually judged the ordeal too much for her. She was sent away from Salem, and unlike her cousin Abigail, she took no further part in the examinations, the courtroom testimony, or the executions that followed.