Hey y’all. Welcome to Fast Facts for Gen Z. I’m your host, Callie, and I don’t know anything about anything. Come with me while I explore the world, and I’ll tell you everything you ever, and never, wanted to know, through the eyes of Gen Z.
Today’s episode: facts and fiction of the Salem Witch Trials, one specific woman named Susannah North Martin, and the complex and confusing nature of witchcraft accusations.
It’s well-known in my family, at least amongst the women, that we’re direct descendants of one of the women killed for witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts in the late 1600s. It’s a funny point of pride that we share, that we come from women so strong that the only thing that could crush them was the Church. To be specific, Susannah North Martin, one of the fourteen women executed for witchcraft in Salem, is my fourteenth-great-grandmother. Which is cool! I recently ran across a court document from her trial – it’s not the original court recording, but it has a record of the content of each testimony, and, of course, the results of the trial. And let me tell you, the accusations against her were wild. Arthur Miller’s The Crucible may as well be nonfiction. Obviously, it was a really strange, dark time, and this level of misogyny isn’t funny… but the accusations are a little funny and you’re allowed to laugh. It sounds so much like fiction. It’s… you’re allowed to laugh.
The document starts out with a record of John Allen’s testimony, a man from the nearby town of Salisbury. He testified, essentially, that Susannah Martin cursed all of his oxen to run away and drown in the river. It’s worth mentioning that he also called her an “old witch” and threatened to throw her into the same river, so… thanks John. As far as witchcraft accusations go, this one seems like fairly recognizable scapegoating. Oxen run away and drown, people are accusing this woman of being a witch, you put two and two together and then you find a way to make losing all your oxen somebody else’s fault. A lot of these testimonies are like that.
The second testimony, from a man named John Atkinson… lots of Johns here, there are more later. Atkinson testified that he exchanged a cow with Martin’s son, but she didn’t want him to, so when the cow was untame and troublesome and difficult to work with, it was due to “no cause but witchcraft.” So the cow is difficult, and it’s her fault because she’s a witch. Makes perfect sense to me. Oh, maybe I should’ve led with this – Susannah Martin was 70 years old at the time of this trial. A 70 year old woman is a witch because her son sold this man a cow who was not entirely tame. Cool. Moving on.
This third one, from a man named Bernard Peache, is when I realized when I read this for the first time that people were truly, truly convinced that they needed to say anything they could to get this woman killed. Was it funny? Yes. But it’s also terrifying. I’ll never know how many of these people truly believed what they were saying, how many were really and truly convinced that they experienced these things, and how many were faking it or bandwagoning against a sharp-tongued widow who had already been accused of witchcraft once 23 years prior to this. So this man, this Bernard guy, he said that Martin did quite a few things to him. First off, he claimed that she climbed through his bedroom window on Sunday night and lay on top of him until he bit her fingers and she ran away and only left two footprints in the snow. His second account of her witchcraft came when she asked him to come to a “Husking of Corn at her House.” A Husking of Corn was an actual thing, it was a social gathering, sort of like going over to a friend’s house for coffee, except instead of drinking coffee you just shucked corn. So Susannah told him to come shuck corn at her house, and he didn’t, and then the next night he got beat up by someone he thought was Susannah Martin and also some other stranger. Ah yes, a 70 year old woman attacked a man in the dead of night for not attending her corn husking. Of course. She also apparently bewitched the cattle to death. Duh.
Let’s move on from Bernard Peache now to another man, Robert Downer. Most, but not all, of the townspeople accusing Martin were men. Here’s another fact: did you know that there were men convicted in Salem too? Wizards. Wizard has such a different connotation in our language than witch does. A wizard is a cool person who does cool magic, or at least an eccentric old man with lots of wisdom and cool tricks up his sleeve. A witch, however, a witch struggles to be anything but evil. A witch delivers curses and makes deals with the devil. A witch is an old hag. Interesting how we use words like this to shape society’s misogyny without even realizing it. Anywho. Robert Downer apparently told Martin at her previous trial that he thought she was a witch, and she snapped back at him that a “She-Devil would shortly snatch him away.” The witchcraft comes in because that night a cat climbed through his window and attacked him, but it ran away when he shouted a prayer at it. Provided that we assume the cat was real, as long as a cat runs away when you shout the name of God at it, that makes it a demon. Not, you know, a cat not liking when you yell at it.
There was another testimony involving animals: that of John Kembal. Not only did she apparently curse his cattle to death, but when he wanted to get a puppy from her and she said no, he was attacked by two black puppies later that day. The puppies, like the cat, ran away when he shouted the name of God at them. Very cool, John, thank you. The most witchcrafty part of this testimony was that even though he didn’t tell anybody about the incident, somehow everyone knew about it the next day. Magic… definitely not gossip or anything.
There were a few testimonies that were funny, but rather bland, so I’ll summarize them quickly. William Brown accused Martin of bewitching his wife because she didn’t like him anymore, a woman – a woman! – named Sarah Atkinson testified that Martin apparently walked around in the rain but she seemed too dry, and a man named Jervis Ring claimed that the little scar on his finger came from Susannah biting him in his sleep. Thank you for your contributions friends, very good.
Our last John of the day had quite the incredible experience, or at least claimed to. John Pressy explained that one evening, as he was walking home through a field, he saw a pillar of bright light about two rod high… I think a rod is like 15 feet? So 30 feet? He could have also meant that it was 30 feet away from him. This was written in 1692, so the language is a little hard to decipher. Anyway, pillar of bright light. Johnny boy hit it with a stick. He hit it like forty times before he was thrown back by a great force into a hole that mysteriously disappeared once he climbed out of it. Once he was out, Susannah Martin was standing where the light had been, but they didn’t say anything to each other. Spooky scary. On a separate occasion, he claimed, she cursed him to never own more than two cows at a time, and for whatever reason he just can’t ever manage to own more than two cows at once so obviously she’s a witch.
But of course, this court document saved the best testimony for last. Or at least, what they considered to be the best, most damning evidence of witchcraft. Section 12 reads “But besides all of these Evidences, there was a most wonderful Account of one Joseph Ring.” Translation: Joseph Ring has the most outlandish, incredible, must-be-witchcraft testimony of them all. Indeed, Joseph’s testimony was quite… outlandish. He claimed to have spent the last two years being carried from witch meeting to witch meeting by Demons, and only now is he able to speak about it. After he was freed, on the condition that he owed the Demons two shillings, he was still captured every now and then by a group of devils and witches and bound in magic chains. They tempted him with “all the delectable Things, Persons, and Places, that he could imagine.” You know, the kind of temptation the Devil does. But Joseph, being a good godly man, always refused the temptation. He claimed that he saw Susannah Martin at several of these demonic meetings. Either our guy Joseph had a really overactive imagination, really really hated Susannah Martin, or had really intense and memorable hallucinations. Whatever was actually going on with this guy, his testimony was apparently what did it for the court.
Susannah Martin was executed as a witch via hanging on July 19, 1962. Some sources say July 29. It doesn’t actually matter very much. Another fact for you: in Salem, in America, really, people executed for witchcraft weren’t burned at the stake. That was more of a France, England, broadly European thing. People accused of being witches were mostly executed by hanging or some other method.
I’m realizing that I talked about this court document with a pretty obvious pro-Susannah Martin bias and anti-everyone else bias, but I think that’s okay. I… yeah, I think that’s okay. I think we’ve pretty much come to the consensus that witchcraft isn’t real and it’s okay to read serious accusations of witchcraft with a certain level of derision. The witch trials, though, were very real. It was very real to her. Whatever was going on in Salem… mass hysteria, maybe one person’s schizophrenia combined with everyone else’s radical Puritanism… it was definitely odd. One… not justification, but reason that’s been suggested is that a lot of the women accused were widows or had otherwise come into possession of land and wealth, and women having land and wealth disrupted the power structure in this strictly Puritan, patriarchal town. Most of the time, when a person dies, their possessions and wealth are inherited by the next of kin, but if you executed a widow for witchcraft, her land and money went to the state and left her children and kin with nothing. The state could then use that land for whatever they wanted. Sell it, gift it to sheriffs and judges to keep them on their side. This is just a theory, of course, and I’m sure there wasn’t just one reason for the Salem witch hunts. A complex situation in the right place at the right time with just the right combination of religious dogma, misogyny, and corrupted and easily exploitable legal system. We’ll almost definitely never know exactly what happened there, but it’s interesting to theorize nonetheless.
The Salem Witch trials are fairly well known, or at least most people have heard of them, but I thought it was interesting to know and to tell a story of one specific person. You know, we hear a lot about how women were executed for witchcraft in Salem, but not much about individual stories. The individual stories aren’t all that different from each other, to be fair, but details are interesting to me. I’ve only ever read this one primary source, so I wonder if there were some fairly common accusations, and which were oddly specific or unique to each person. Perhaps more research is in order.
Thank you for listening to Fast Facts for Gen Z. I release new episodes every single Thursday, except when I release them on Friday, so be sure to follow this podcast to be notified whenever a new one comes out. This is Callie, signing off.
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