“The deposition of Ann Putnam, Jr., who testifieth and saith, that on the 25th of February, 1691-92, I saw the apparition of Sarah Good, which did torture me most grievously; but I did not know her name till the 27th of February, and then she told me her name was Sarah Good. And then she did pinch me most grievously; and also since; several times urging me vehemently to write in her book. And also on the 1st of March, being the day of her examination, Sarah Good did most grievously torture me; and also several times since. And also on the first day of March, 1692, I saw the apparition of Sarah Good go and afflict and torture the bodies of Elizabeth Parris, Abigail Williams, and Elizabeth Hubbard. Also I have seen the apparition of Sarah Good afflicting the body of Sarah Vibber.
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“Ann Putnam.”
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That deposition furnishes a fair specimen of the kind of evidence sought for, admitted, and applied to prove probable compact with the devil. All of the above pertains to the first examination made at Salem, and it reveals the opinions then prevalent relating to covenantings with the Evil One, to powers and dispositions thence derived, and to then existing legal methods for proving such compacts. There is little indication that experiences at Salem, during the spring and summer of 1692, gave either the examining magistrates, or the court, much, if any, new light or any increase of wisdom or humaneness. Whatever modification of processes of procedure subsequently took place, and whatever change of decisions as to the value and admissibility of spectral evidence occurred, was for the worse rather than the better. The creeds and laws conformed to then were not formed and adopted for that occasion, but had prior existence, and were here applied with strenuous vigor by firm hearts and clear heads. Amid all the excitement, frenzy, infatuation, delusion, and credulity then abounding, logic retained its power and guidance, and held courts and juries to the requirements of the wholesome statutes of the English Parliament, pertaining to witchcraft and to Christendom’s witchcraft creed. Old laws and faiths were here tested by strong men. They held for a time, and wrought woeful effects, but finally were broken.
Sarah Good was wife of an inefficient husband, “William Good, laborer.” The family was very poor, having at times no home excepting such as charity granted them temporarily. She is spoken of by Calef as having “long been accounted a melancholy or distracted woman.” Upham says that “she was a forlorn, friendless, and forsaken creature, broken down by wretchedness of condition and ill repute.” We find no reason for dissenting from that writer’s statement when he says elsewhere, that “she was an unfortunate and miserable woman in her circumstances and condition;” but we doubt the fitness of calling her “forlorn” and “broken down.” She may have been so; but the spirit and energy generally manifested by her words and acts indicate the probability that she was rather a heedless, bold woman, free and harsh in the use of her tongue, and not very sensitive to or regardful of public opinion, but yet strong and not despondent. That she may have long been deemed, as Calef says she was, a “distracted” woman, is very probable, for many simply mediumistic persons, and even more of us who at this day solely because we believe in the advent of spirits, both good and less good, have long been accounted crazy.
We have met with no indication that she was physically weak or mentally despondent. She seems to have borne up well under long, tedious horseback rides daily to and from Ipswich jail, nine or ten miles distant, whither she was nightly sent ever after the time of her becoming invisible to her guards. Her keeper on the way says, “she leaped off her horse three times, railed at the magistrates, and endeavored to kill herself.” That attempt, if she made one, to take her own life, was scarcely less likely to spring from the angry mental mood then prompting her to rail against the magistrates, than from despondency or forlornness.
When under examination, her answers were about as direct, explicit, and to the point, as most other suspected ones were able to give to the perplexing questions which were put; and some of hers have more snap than we usually find in words from lips of the “forlorn and broken down.”
It is not probable that her previous life had won much public favor; yet no evidence has been met with that her neighbors generally cherished hostile feelings towards her, or possessed sentiments which would prompt them to rejoice at her prosecution. We, as has already been made apparent, ascribe her arrest to other causes than the lowness of her character and condition. That was not the primal incentive to her being “cried out upon.” Her organization, and the then existing condition of her faculties, made her either a convenient channel through which to transmit, or a fountain from which to draw, forces into the systems of certain other sensitives, which forces might act therein for either the annoyance and suffering, or the pleasure and relief of the recipients, according to either inherent properties of the forces themselves, or to the purpose of some intelligence who should inflow and manipulate them. The sensitive girls might, and, if well unfolded mediumistically, would unerringly trace back such forces as acted upon themselves to their mundane point of emanation, and in good conscience and good faith accuse the person from whom the forces issued of being their tormentor; if clairvoyant they could see, if clairaudient could hear, and, if not specially unfolded for seeing with the inner eye and hearing with the inner ear, could sense the person from whom the foreign and disturbing influences came forth.
A bold spirit and prophetic glance pertained to this woman at the close of her mortal life. When near the gallows, and about to be executed, Mr. Noyes, the clergyman at Salem proper, told her “she was a witch, and she knew that she was a witch.” She promptly retorted, “You are a liar. I am no more a witch than you are a wizard; and if you take away my life, God will give you blood to drink.” Subsequently that man “died of an internal hemorage, bleading profusely at the mouth.” (Hist. of Witchcraft, vol. ii. p. 270.) Gleamings of what will be often meet internal or mediumistic eyes; and such probably did those of Sarah Good at that instant, and authorized her prophetic utterance.