Early American horror show

The Salem Witch Trials remain a hideous -- yet disturbingly familiar -- mystery.

By Laura Miller

Oct 29, 2002 | The Salem Witch Trials are America's original home-grown horror. The crisis happened over 300 years ago in a world very different from today's -- and to people seemingly very different from ourselves -- and yet so many of its elements keep cropping up again and again in our public life. A panic that spreads like a virus, intimations of a vile conspiracy, children and young women horribly abused, a fog of accusations, shocking confessions, sensational trials, reputations destroyed, culprits (or scapegoats) located and harshly punished, and an aftermath in which anyone with a conscience looks back and asks, "What just happened? Did we really do that?"

Salem, too, is a challenge to everyone, whether on the left or the right, who sentimentalizes or idealizes the Way Things Used to Be. Feeling nostalgic for the peace and safety of small town life? Convinced that what the world needs now is a return to Christian values? Think that the trouble with contemporary society is that we've lost our sense of community? Well, Salem was a small town, as Christian as they come, and it's got to be Exhibit A on the list of what sucks about living in a place where everybody knows your name.

At first glance, we seem in no danger of letting the memory of Salem fade. Fifty years ago, the Witch Trials served as a metaphor for McCarthyism in Arthur Miller's play "The Crucible." A decade or two later they provided fodder for cheesy horror movies starring Hope Lange in Pilgrim drag or Vincent Price with bushy sideburns. If you visit Salem today, you'll find a town so intent on using witch-oriented tourism to revive its faltering economy that it has enlisted such wax-museum-style attractions as Dracula's Castle, the Vampire Vortex and Boris Karloff's Witch Mansion, all of which, as David J. Skal observes in his book "Death Makes a Holiday," owe "more to Hollywood than to historical New England." The town throws a big, spooky Halloween celebration each year, even though Oct. 31 has no relevance to the Trials and meant nothing at all to the Puritans.

The trouble is, the ways we choose to remember the Salem Witch Trials bring us perilously close to forgetting them. The crisis was and is terrifying, but not because it had anything to do with the occult. It offers the bewildering and horrific spectacle of a small community plunging into senseless self-destruction -- as nightmares go, its closest cousins may have transpired in other small towns in Poland and the Ukraine during World War II or Rwanda in the 1990s. Worst of all, the institutions intended to provide Salem's people with justice ended up perpetrating hideous crimes, a spectacle not limited to the pre-modern world. The Salem crisis remains fundamentally mysterious, which may be one reason why historians keep coming back to it, telling the story over and over again, placing the emphasis on different factors each time, looking for an answer to a question that will probably never be satisfied: Why?

The bare bones of the story are as follows. In mid-January 1692, two girls living in the parsonage in the settlement of Salem Village began to have strange fits. When their condition did not improve, witchcraft was suspected and one of the household servants, a slave of Caribbean descent, attempted a counterspell with the intention of either relieving the girls or identifying the culprint. The fits worsened, but the girls named some local women as their tormentors, claiming these "witches" appeared in a spectral form visible to them alone.

Over the next few months, more people, mostly girls and young women, were afflicted, accusing an ever-increasing number of their neighbors of spectrally torturing and threatening them. The accused were arrested, questioned by magistrates, imprisoned in Salem and Boston and, in some cases, officially tried for witchcraft, a capital crime in colonial Massachusetts. During that summer, the afflictions and accusations multiplied at a fevered rate, spreading throughout Essex County. By the end of September, 19 of the convicted had been hanged and one man was pressed to death under heavy stones, an ordeal intended to get him to agree to a trial. Doubts about the proceedings began to well up at that point and the governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony ordered the proceedings suspended. The crisis would take another year or so to entirely blow over, by which point an additional four accused persons had died in the region's jails, which were described by a visiting Englishman as "suburbs of Hell." The rest of the accused were gradually released.

The exact details of how this happened are difficult to pin down. Contemporary records are inconsistent and incomplete, and as Mary Beth Norton notes in "In the Devil's Snare," her new account of the crisis, descendants of some participants destroyed documents in an attempt to erase their family's role in what was soon regarded as a shameful debacle.

What's more, 17th-century people seldom set down the kind of information that seems meaningful to us. Contrary to what you might conclude from seeing Miller's "The Crucible," for example, virtually everyone believed that witches existed, even if not everyone thought that witchcraft was the source of the afflicted's troubles. They didn't psychologize, and their reasoning was frustratingly unsystematic. Salem's residents inhabited "a pre-Enlightenment world that had not yet experienced the scientific revolution, with its emphasis on the careful study of physical phenomena through controlled experimentation and observation." They believed in a vast, invisible reality populated by throngs of spirits. "Wonders of the Invisible World" was the title the famous Puritan cleric Cotton Mather chose for the book he wrote in defense of the Trials.

Next Page: Were the accusers suffering from witnessing Indian massacres?

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