Salem, Massachusetts is a town infamous for its witchcraft trials and mass executions in Within that year alone, the conservative Puritan authorities of Salem arrested 175people, and hung twenty two of them. Yet, what could go so terribly wrong so that anentire town of upright citizens would decline to such a state of hysteria so that theywould accuse their own neighbors of wizardry? Conzen’s America’s History points outthat even educated and esteemed men such as Samuel Sewall tended toward superstition,associating the natural with the supernatural; and even though they were Christians, theystill did not entirely dismiss the pagan deities popular in their day. The rigid Puritanministers attacked these beliefs because they were different from their own (Conzen, 60). It even states within the Bible, “You shall not let a sorceress live,” (Exodus 22:17). Naturally, a minister could use the Bible to convince the crowds that anythingsupernatural was evil and must be demolished. It seems that any event out of the norm was considered the work of the devil andhis human accomplices. T.E. Wilder points out in “A Problem of Authority” that when achild became ill or a cow stopped producing milk a neighbor would be accused ofwitch-craft. So why would neighbors blame neighbors? Wilder states that, “fear andsuspicion govern behavior, and no one wants to risk drawing the hostile attentions ofthose adept with dark powers.” Basically, it was mass hysteria, and even revenge. Family feuds rooted back some ten or twenty years would be dragged into the courtroomand interpreted to be some curse (Wilder, 1). What made black magic all the more believable and fearsome was the actualconfessions of “witches” who admitted to being witches and having “evil designs upontheir neighbors,” (Palmer, 311). Of course one cannot help but to want to believe them,but the fact is that they c...
