Summary.
1648. Margaret Jones manifested startling efficacy of hands and medicines, consternating keenness of perceptives, predictions subsequently verified, and the presence of a vanishing child. Such was her witchcraft; and for this she was executed.
1656. Ann Hibbins comprehended conversation between persons too distant from her to be heard normally, ... and was hanged.
1662. Ann Cole had her form possessed and spoken through by either the devil or other disembodied ones, and by them made both to express thoughts that never were in her mind, and to further the conviction and execution of the Greensmiths.
1671-2. Elizabeth Knap’s external form was strangely convulsed and agonized by an old man, and also spoken through by one who called himself a pretty black boy.
1680. William Morse, in his home, where lived his good wife, who had been called a witch, saw pots, andirons, tools, and household furniture generally, seem to take on wills of their own, and rudely play many a lively gymnastic game.
1688. John Goodwin saw four of his children subjected and tortured immediately subsequent to the scolding of one of them by a wild Irish woman; and the same one afterward was made to play the deuce in Cotton Mather’s own house. Mrs. Glover was hanged for bewitching; and also she continued to torture the same children after her spirit had left its outer form.
The above cases occurred prior to the holding of “The Circle” at Salem, before the establishment of a school at which the arts of “necromancy, magic, and spiritualism” might be learned. Generally the performers named thus far had no visible confederates. If sole actors, their geniuses were vast, and the fonts of malice or of benevolence in some of them were both very capacious and copiously overflowing.
1692. Tituba, the slave, avowed having been forced by something like a man, and his four female spectral aids, to pinch the two little girls in her master’s family at the very time when they were first mysteriously afflicted. She furnished strong evidence that a tall man with white hair and serge coat, invisibly to others, frequently visited her, compelled her aid, and kindled and long kept adding fuel to the fires of witchcraft at Salem Village. For this she was imprisoned thirteen months, and then sold to pay her jail fees.
Sarah Good was seen as a specter, was accused of hurting by occult organs and processes; became invisible by those standing guard over her; announced to the magistrates the great explanatory fact that none but the accusers and the accused, that is, none but clairvoyants, could see the actual inflictors of the pains endured. Also she fore-sensed a fact that occurred when Mr. Noyes died in an after year. She was hanged.