Witches: The Absolutely True Tale of Disaster in Salem by Rosalyn Schanzer Read Free Book Online Page A

book—including spectral evidence—to see that they were hanged.
    To be sure, a number of people had always been leery about the use of spectral evidence in court, and a few brave souls were not afraid to say so out loud. But when the new court was formed, these skeptics were in the minority. The majority still agreed with Willard; to them, spectral evidence provided unvarnished proof that someone was a witch.
    And another circumstance did not bode well for the accused witches. Several of the judges had served together on the Maine frontier as councillors or officers during the Second Indian War. The English were losing the war in a big way, often because of the judges’ own blunders—blunders that had gotten people killed. But instead of taking the blame, they attributed their defeats to “the awfull Frowne of God,” for it was God who had loosened the Devil’s chains to let him work his evil deeds upon New Englanders as a punishment for their sins. Therefore all those lost battles—and even the attacks by witches—must have been the fault of sinners in their midst, not the fault of the judges’ military errors. Why? If the Puritans had behaved themselves, God would have been on their side, the war would have been won, and witchcraft would never have erupted. To the judges, it apparently made sense to blame the lost battles on witches, who were the Devil’s representatives in the Natural World.
     
    I t was June 2, 1692, and the time to begin the first formal trial for witchcraft had arrived at last. The first person to be tried was Bridget Bishop, the keeper of Salem Town’s rowdy tavern.
    Bishop seemed doomed from the start. As she was led from the jail toward the court, she glanced over at an empty church just as something came crashing down inside its walls. The spectators were sure that her spirit had caused all the trouble. This was not a good sign.
    The moment Bishop arrived in court and pled innocent, another torrent of accusations poured forth—and nothing had changed from the previous hearings because every single bit of the evidence against her was spectral. One man claimed that Bishop had bewitched his child; he said the boy had been stupefied for 12 years. Another man said that 14 years earlier Bishop had hired him to do some work and paid him well, but by the time he got 15 or 20 yards away from her house, he realized that the money had vanished out of his pocket. Not long after that, the man saw her again, and his wagon “plumped or sunk down into a hole upon plain ground” and his wagon wheel fell off. He even testified that Bishop’s spirit had been hopping around on his bed wearing a black cape and hat.
    A woman who had given Bishop a tongue lashing for stealing her spoon ten years earlier was convinced that Bishop’s specter was trying to drown her. Crazed with fear, she had lost her sanity. Bishop’s spirit had supposedly snatched a girl from her spinning wheel and tried to drown her, too. And some people even claimed to have met ghosts who said they were killed when Bishop stared at them with her evil “eye beams.” One field hand said he saw Bishop’s spirit stealing eggs again and then stared in wonder as she transformed herself into a cat.
    Two workers who had repaired Bishop’s house testified that they had found some old stuffed dolls called poppits hidden inside a wall. Nobody really knew who owned them, but they were made out of rags and boar bristles, and lots of headless pins had been stuck into them. This was bad news because people had also found pins stuck into the accusers’ skin right there in the courtroom. Could Bishop’s spirit have put pins into the dolls in her house in order to torture her victims from afar?
    But here’s the story that sealed her fate. According to Bishop’s neighbor, a hairy, black thing with the face of a man, the body of a monkey, and the feet of a rooster jumped into his window carrying a message from the Devil, who was out to kill him.