The Salem Witch Trials: Historical Fiction Brought To Life
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The Salem Witch Trials have always been a time in history that intrigued me. The first time I really became acquainted with it all was during a field trip I took with my girl scout troop in junior high. We went to Salem during October for their Haunted Happenings festival. It was amazing! They had spooky haunted houses, museums and reenactments, magical tarot card readings etc. I was hooked! This festival still occurs every year and if you get a chance to check it out, I strongly encourage you to do so. It’s a great time!
However, even back then it was not lost on me that these spooktacular Halloween events were tied to real history and people. I was already becoming a history and historical fiction nerd. So, what did I do? I started researching and devouring all the Salem Witch Trial books I could find.
The Salem Witch Trials really are a frightening example of the power of Mob Mentality. When I taught The Crucible to my 11th graders we even compared it to the divisive nature of politics over the years.
Magic, Children or Politics: The Start of the Salem Witch Trials
It all began in colonial Massachusetts in the early 1690s. A minister named Samuel Parris had earned a reputation among the people of Salem for being inflexible and greedy. There were folks who were beginning to question him and a chasm was growing. However, Parris blamed the quarreling on the work of the devil.
Then in January 1692, Parris’s daughter, Betty, age 9, and his niece, Abigail Williams, age 11, started suffering from “fits”. They screamed, threw things, uttered nonsense and contorted themselves into unnatural positions. A local doctor arrived and blamed the supernatural. Soon another girl, Ann Putnam, began experiencing the “fits” as well. By February, local magistrates came and under their pressure, the girls blamed three women for casting spells on them. The women named were Tituba, a Caribbean woman who was enslaved by the Parris family, Sarah Good, a homeless beggar, and Sarah Osborne, an elderly poor woman.
The trials began in March. Osborne and Good professed their innocence, but Tituba confessed and claimed the Devil made her do it and there were other witches in Salem. All three women were declared guilty and paranoia spread. Soon, accusations were flying wildly.
Salem created a special court. Cotton Mather, a respected minister, stepped forward and implored the court to disallow the use of “spectral” evidence- dreams and visions. However, the court refused and instead the hangings began. Ten people were hanged that summer followed by eight more in September.
By October, Mather’s father, Increase, then president of Harvard, stepped forward to repeat his son’s request to denounce “spectral” evidence. He was quoted as saying, “It were better that ten suspected witches should escape than one innocent person be condemned.”
Motivated to End the Salem Witch Trials
This time, Governor Phips, whose own wife was now being accused, prohibited further arrests, dissolved the special court and disallowed the use of “spectral” evidence.
By May of 1693, Phips went one step further to end the hysteria. He pardoned the remaining prisoners accused of witchcraft. But the damage had already been done. Nineteen men and women had been hanged on Gallows Hill. One other had been pressed to death when he refused trial, and five others had died in prison while awaiting trial.
It took many years for true restitution to occur. Judge Samuel Sewell, who oversaw the special court, and accuser, Ann Putnam, came forward to admit error and guilt in the hysteria. In 1702, a Massachusetts court declared the trials unlawful. And in 1711, the colony passed a bill restoring the rights and good names to the accused and paid a restitution to their heirs. But it wasn’t until 1957- more than 250 years later- that Massachusetts formally apologized for the events of 1692.
Like me, many continue to be fascinated by the strange events and hysteria surrounding the Salem Witch Trials. Scientists and historians continue to explore explanations for the “fits” the girls suffered. These so far range from food poisoning by fungi, to a reaction to church politics, family feuds and hysterics. But it is still a cause of much debate. And every year, the Salem Witch Museum and the town’s Haunted Happening festival continue to be one of the most-visited spots in the United States.
Salem Witch Trials Booklist
If you find yourself captivated by this intriguing period of history, here are a few of my favorite Salem Witch Trial Books
The Heretic’s Daughter
by Kathleen Kent
Salem, 1752. Sarah Carrier Chapman, weak with infirmity, writes a letter to her granddaughter that reveals the secret she has closely guarded for six decades: how she survived the Salem Witch Trials when her mother did not.
Sarah’s story begins more than a year before the trials, when she and her family arrive in a New England community already gripped by superstition and fear. As they witness neighbor pitted against neighbor, friend against friend, the hysteria escalates — until more than two hundred men, women, and children have been swept into prison.
Among them is Sarah’s mother, Martha Carrier. In an attempt to protect her children, Martha asks Sarah to commit an act of heresy — a lie that will most surely condemn Martha even as it will save her daughter.
This is the story of Martha’s courageous defiance and ultimate death, as told by the daughter who survived.
Beyond the Burning Time
by Kathryn Lasky
When young Betty Parris contracts a mysterious ailment that spreads to other girls in her Puritan village of Salem, Betty and her family must confront the deadly superstitions that will change their lives.
This is a nostalgic one for me! This was the first book I found and read after my junior high visit to Salem. I still have it on my bookshelf today.
A Break with Charity
by Ann Rinaldi
Susanna desperately wants to join the circle of girls who meet every week at the parsonage. What she doesn’t realize is that the girls are about to set off a torrent of false accusations leading to the imprisonment and execution of countless innocent people. Susanna faces a painful choice. Should she keep quiet and let the witch-hunt panic continue, or should she “break charity” with the group–and risk having her own family members named as witches?
Reader’s guide included.
I love this first person narrative and this one really gives you an insider perspective and feel for the hysteria and moral debates as the hysteria ensues.
I love this first person narrative and this one really gives you an insider perspective and feel for the hysteria and moral debates as the hysteria ensues.
I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem
by Maryse Conde
This book is a fascinating read. I always questioned Tituba. Why would she confess? Did she not realize she was the last inciting match that burst this hysteria into flames? Did she not care? Conde goes deep into the character of Tituba and creates a believable history and story for what Tituba endured. An overall fabulous book!
This wild and entertaining novel expands on the true story of the West Indian slave Tituba, who was accused of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts, arrested in 1692, and forgotten in jail until the general amnesty for witches two years later. Maryse Condé brings Tituba out of historical silence and creates for her a fictional childhood, adolescence, and old age. She turns her into what she calls “a sort of female hero, an epic heroine, like the legendary ‘Nanny of the maroons,’” who, schooled in the sorcery and magical ritual of obeah, is arrested for healing members of the family that owns her.
Maryse Condé brings Tituba out of historical silence and creates for her a fictional childhood, adolescence, and old age. She turns her into what she calls “a sort of female hero, an epic heroine, like the legendary ‘Nanny of the maroons,’” who, schooled in the sorcery and magical ritual of obeah, is arrested for healing members of the family that owns her.
Hour of the Witch
by Chris Bohjalian
Boston, 1662. Mary Deerfield is twenty-four-years-old. Her skin is porcelain, her eyes delft blue, and in England she might have had many suitors. But here in the New World, amid this community of saints, Mary is the second wife of Thomas Deerfield, a man as cruel as he is powerful. When Thomas, prone to drunken rage, drives a three-tined fork into the back of Mary’s hand, she resolves that she must divorce him to save her life.
But in a world where every neighbor is watching for signs of the devil, a woman like Mary—a woman who harbors secret desires and finds it difficult to tolerate the brazen hypocrisy of so many men in the colony—soon becomes herself the object of suspicion and rumor.
The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane
by Katherine Howe
Harvard graduate student Connie Goodwin needs to spend her summer doing research for her doctoral dissertation. But when her mother asks her to handle the sale of Connie’s grandmother’s abandoned home near Salem, she can’t refuse. As she is drawn deeper into the mysteries of the family house, Connie discovers an ancient key within a seventeenth-century Bible. The key contains a yellowing fragment of parchment with a name written upon it: Deliverance Dane. This discovery launches Connie on a quest-to find out who this woman was and to unearth a rare artifact of singular power: a physick book, its pages a secret repository for lost knowledge.
As the pieces of Deliverance’s harrowing story begin to fall into place, Connie is haunted by visions of the long-ago witch trials, and she begins to fear that she is more tied to Salem’s dark past then she could have ever imagined.
Written with astonishing conviction and grace, The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane travels seamlessly between the witch trials of the 1690s and a modern woman’s story of mystery, intrigue, and revelation.
If you enjoyed this selection here are a few more you may be interested in!
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