From among the works of witchcraft that occurred from 1648 to 1688, we have now presented six cases, which bring into view some phenomena that are very like many which are now called spirit manifestations. The efficient touch of Margaret Jones, of Charlestown, the extraordinary efficacy of her hands and simple medicines, her prophetic powers, the keenness of her hearing, and the materialization of a spirit-child in her arms, brought her to the gallows in 1648. Ann Hibbins, of Boston, seemingly because of the wit-sharpening acuteness of her hearing, was hanged in 1656. Ann Cole, of Hartford, Conn., in 1662, had her vocal organs “improved” by some intelligence not her own for the utterance of thoughts which were never in her mind, and some of the utterances through her contributed to the conviction and consequent execution of the two Greensmiths, husband and wife. At Groton, a spirit controlling the form of Elizabeth Knap, in 1671, made avowal that he was “a pretty black boy, and not Satan.” At Newbury, in 1679, the wild dance of pots, kettles, andirons, and things in general, came off on the premises of William Morse. And at Boston, in 1688, inflictions upon the Goodwin children led to the execution of Mrs. Glover, “one of the wild Irish.”
Cases thus scattered in both time and space, half of them limited each to a single actor or sufferer, and each differing widely from any other in many of its prominent features, cannot satisfactorily be ascribed to acquired skill in legerdemain, histrionic art, magic, or necromancy, unattended by help from the living dead.
The name of the wild Irish woman, whose harsh language was speedily followed by the distortions and sufferings of the Goodwin children, was Glover. Calef calls her “a despised, crazy, ill-conditioned old woman—an Irish Roman Catholic.” The public believed that she put forth criminal action upon that family, arrested her therefor, received at her trial some indications that she had dealings with invisible beings, pronounced her guilty of witchcraft, and hanged her. She doubtless forsensed retention of power to act either directly or through others upon the objects of her resentment, even after the gallows should have done its utmost work upon herself. For it is stated that “at her execution she said the children would not be relieved by her death ... and ... the three children continued in their furnace as before, and it grew rather seven times hotter than it was, and their calamities went on till they barked at one another like dogs, and then purred like so many cats; would complain that they were in a red-hot oven, and sweat and pant as if they had been really so. Anon they would say cold water was thrown on them, at which they would shiver very much. They would complain of being roasted on an invisible spit; and then that their heads were nailed to the floor, and it was beyond an ordinary strength to pull them from it.”—Annals of Witchcraft, p. 185.
Such facts were gathered from Cotton Mather’s account; they come to us from one whose influences and writings are alleged to have been most strongly provocative of executions for witchcraft. Perhaps some of them became so. But his presentation of both the momentous fact and its confirmation by observed experiences, that the spirit of an executed psychologist could act back from beyond the gallows, involved a crushing argument against the wisdom of suspending her or any one else with a view to stop bewitchment. The liberation of one’s spirit increases its powers for action upon surviving mortals. Mather’s facts argued that.
SALEM WITCHCRAFT.
The world-renowned and momentous display of extraordinary manifestations, known the world over as Salem Witchcraft, originated and was mainly manifested in what was then called Salem Village—territory distinct from Salem proper—embracing the present town of Danvers, together with parts of Beverly, Wenham, Topsfield, and Middleton, in the County of Essex and State of Massachusetts.
There, in the family of the Rev. Samuel Parris, minister at the Village, on the 29th of February, 1692, mysterious causes had wrought strange maladies upon two young girls during the six preceding weeks, which excited great public alarm, and produced such mental agitation that the civil authorities were called upon to give the matter official attention.
The true origin and the actual authors and enactors of that tragedy are among the prime objects of our present researches. It is not our purpose to furnish a full history, but to scrutinize and test the hypotheses of other writers; and give a solution of the origin and specification of the actors and effects of that tragedy different—widely different—from the prevalent modern ones. Upham, Drake, and Fowler all agree in fundamentals. All of them have assumed that the agents and forces which evolved those marvelous operations were scarcely, if anything, other than ten or twelve respectable girls, from nine to twenty years of age, together with a few married women and a few men, voluntarily exercising and manifesting only their own wayward constitutional faculties and forces, in the performance of tricks, impositions, and malignancies; and with none other than lamentable results. Their positions we deem open to deserved attack, and we expect to overthrow much that has been reared upon them, by using facts abounding in the primitive records of testimony given in at trials for witchcraft as our chief instrumentalities. The three expounders just named have rested much upon allegations that the girls and women alluded to above had, just previous to the strange outburst of terrors at the Village, been accustomed to meet as a circle, and at their meetings put themselves in training for the efficient and successful performance of what soon after transpired through them. Our readings of the records pertaining to Salem witchcraft have, as we know and freely confess, fallen short of complete exhaustion; and yet we have read much, and also have failed to find any remembered allusion to such a circle prior to its mention in the present century.