Salem Witchcraft

The Salem Witchcraft

Salem is located in Massachusetts. It was called as Salem Village. Its population was around 600 people or 100 households. It all started when weird behaviors of two young girls, the daughter, Betty, and the niece, Abigail Williams, of the Salem Village minister, Reverend Samuel Parris, was noticed.

The legal processes of witchcraft cases were not reasonable. The afflicted person makes a complaint to the Magistrate. They don't even need an evidence to prove it. The Magistrate will then issue an arrest warrant of the accused person. That person is then arrested and kept into custody. Two or more Magistrates investigates or examines the person by asking questions. The case is then presented to the Grand Jury. Whoever seen the person before acting weirdly or whoever suspects the person enters in as evidences. If the accused is indicted by the Grand Jury, he or she is tried before the Court of Oyer and Terminer (the Anglo-French name, meaning to hear and determine, for one of the commissions by which a judge of assize sits). A jury, instructed by the court, decides the defendant's guilt. After all this, the accused person gets his or her sentencing from the court. Then the Sheriff and his deputies carry out the sentence of death at a specific date as ordered by the court.

The Salem witch trials officially started February 29, 1692 when warrants were issued for the arrests of Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborne. They were examined by Magistrates Jonathan Corwin and John Hathorne. Good, orphaned as a teenager at the death of her mother (a French innkeeper) was the town beggar, noted for her strange "muttering." Osborne was a bedridden elderly woman who had gotten on the wrong side of the Putnams when she cheated her first husband's children out of their inheritance, giving it to her new husband. Tituba was the Carib Native American slave of Samuel Parris; though she is very often referred to as black in modern historical and fictional interpretations of the trials, there is no evidence that she was anything but Native American.

These women were charged with witchcraft on March 1 and put in prison. Other accusations followed: Dorcas Good (four-year-old daughter of Sarah Good), Rebecca Nurse (a bedridden grandmother of (allegedly) saintly disposition), Abigail Hobbs, Deliverance Hobbs, Martha Corey, and Elizabeth and John Proctor. As the number of accusations grew, the jail populations of Salem, Boston, and surrounding areas swelled, and a new problem surfaced: Without a legitimate form of government, there was no way to try these women. None of them were tried until late May, when Governor Phips arrived and instituted a Court of Oyer and Terminer (to "hear and determine"). By then, Sarah Osborne had died in jail without a trial, as had Sarah Good's newborn baby girl, and many others were ill; there were perhaps 80 people in jail awaiting trial.

After one and a half years from the starting there were 31 people accused of witchcraft.

- 19 were hung

- 2 died in jail

- 1 was pressed to death

- 1 was held indefinitely

- 2 were postponed for pregnancy

- 1 escaped

- 5 gained reprieves

- 80 of accused persons were locked in jail for a long time

Some of the accused and sentenced to death people are Bridget Bishop, Rebecca