In the Devil's Snare by Mary Beth Norton Read Free Book Online Page A

information with others. 43
    Tituba’s disclosures about the witch conspiracy continued to affect the impressionable William Allen and John Hughes, this time separately. On the evening of March 2, Allen was in bed when Sarah Good “vissabley appeared to him,” sitting on his foot surrounded with “an unuseuall light,” but she disappeared when he kicked her. As for Hughes, he was on his way home after dark from Samuel Sibley’s (where the chief topic of conversation was undoubtedly Goody Good’s spectral visit to Dr. Griggs’s house the previous night) when he saw “a Great white dogg” that followed him before disappearing mysteriously. Later, in bed “in a clossd Roome and the dore being fast,” he saw “a Great light” and “a large Grey Catt att his beds foot.” Accounts of such apparitions must have circulated around the Village in conjunction with Samuel Braybrook’s report that while he was carrying Sarah Good to jail in Ipswich that same day she had leapt off her horse three times, and that Ann Putnam Jr. had “declared the same att her fathers house,” thus demonstrating the accuracy of her spectral sight. 44
    The Reverend John Hale, for one, later recalled that he had found Tituba’s confessions credible because of their consistency. Had she been lying, he thought, she would have contradicted herself. Moreover, she seemed “very penitent” for making a covenant with the devil, and she herself was afflicted by other witches for confessing. Finally, her confession “agreed exactly . . . with the accusation of the afflicted.” Others most likely concurred with Hale’s assessment. At the end of the first week of March 1691/2, therefore, the people of Salem Village and nearby towns had much to ponder and to discuss. Not least among their topics of conversation would have been new accusations. On March 3, Ann Jr. complained that Sarah Good’s young daughter Dorcas “did immediatly almost choak me and tortored me most greviously.” And three days later, during services on Sunday, March 6, she told “them that held me” that the specter of Elizabeth Bassett Proctor, the granddaughter of a woman accused of witchcraft in 1669, had choked, bitten, and pinched her three days earlier. She had seen Goody Proctor “amongst the wicthes” on March 3, Ann disclosed, but she did not recognize her until she saw her in church. 45
    TORMENTED YOUNG PEOPLE AND NEIGHBORING WITCHES
    The events of mid-January through early March 1691/2 in Salem Village were unusual but not unprecedented in either old or New England. Ever since the final decades of the sixteenth century, similar events had occurred: daughters—and sons—of pious families would experience mysterious afflictions; physicians would eventually diagnose witchcraft; specters would be seen and suspects named; and occasionally trials would be held. Most commonly, the suspects identified were (like Sarah Good) women widely thought to be witches or (like Sarah Osborne) women from families involved in disputes with those of the accusers. The trials did not always end in conviction, but families of the tormented youths rarely if ever questioned the legitimacy of their “preternatural” afflictions, although other observers sometimes did.
    Seventeenth-century authors admitted the difficulty of distinguishing between the effects of disease and the devil’s operations on the bodies of afflicted persons. The magistrates and judges in 1692 are known to have consulted a standard witchcraft reference work, the Reverend Richard Bernard’s
Guide to Grand-Jury Men,
published in England in 1627. Bernard believed that both ministers and secular authorities had adopted an overly credulous approach to witchcraft accusations, and he urged caution in reaching the conclusion that such charges were valid. In particular, he warned that because certain illnesses could mimic diabolical tortures, it was necessary to seek “the judgement of some skilfull Physician to helpe