Selects: Salem Witchcraft Trials: More Bonkers Than You Know

Josh opens the Halloween episode by arguing that the Salem Witchcraft Trials are much more frightening than a conventional ghost story because people were genuinely executed after their neighbors turned against them. He says that imagining the accused walking toward the gallows makes the episode an existential horror story rather than just Halloween atmosphere. Chuck agrees that the events were “messed up in every way, shape, or form.” They briefly compare the history with Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and the film The Witch; Josh says he is still waiting for a definitive Salem film, while Chuck argues that The Witch is close enough, prompting Josh to say he completely disagrees and move on. The hosts emphasize that historians still do not fully understand why Salem’s panic became so extreme. The trials were well documented in court records, but the surviving sources are mostly official documents rather than private journals and letters, so they reveal what happened procedurally more clearly than what people privately thought. Other colonies and countries had witch trials, but Salem uniquely escalated from accusations to mass imprisonment and executions. John Demos’s explanation is introduced: witch panics become possible when a small, stressed community has settled long enough for grudges and familiarity to accumulate, while residents remain packed closely together. Salem Village and Salem Town fit that pattern, with constant land and livestock disputes and a reputation for being unusually quarrelsome.

The hosts explain that Salem’s backdrop was a Massachusetts Bay Colony controlled by Puritans who often distrusted one another and were openly hostile to groups such as Quakers and Catholics. Josh adds nuance: leaders such as Increase Mather wanted firm Puritan control, but some Puritan authorities supported limited voting and political rights for non-Puritans. The community was deeply litigious, routinely dragging neighbors into court before attempting private mediation. Salem Village, now Danvers, and Salem Town, now Salem, were crowded together, making it difficult to avoid people involved in longstanding land disputes and personal rivalries. Earlier New England accusations often functioned as threats or ways of forcing a neighbor to take a dispute seriously. People generally believed witches existed, but accusations normally did not proceed all the way to executions. Salem differed because its panic kept advancing through investigation, court proceedings, imprisonment, and death. The colony also lived under persistent military anxiety, including conflicts involving Native Americans and the French. The hosts suggest that fear, overcrowding, political instability, and accumulated grievances made the town vulnerable. Even during the panic, not everyone agreed with what was happening, but speaking against the proceedings—or testifying for an accused person—could make someone a target as well. Josh compares the resulting process to an “inevitable machine” that ordinary people tried to avoid rather than openly confront.

Josh and Chuck turn to Increase Mather and his son Cotton Mather, both influential Puritan figures who wrote about supernatural subjects and believed that demons, Satanic possession, and real witchcraft were possible. Increase was a powerful religious and political leader who worked toward a charter that would preserve strong Puritan authority. The hosts say he deserved blame for helping fan the initial flames, although they stress that lesser-known officials and opportunists behaved even more villainously during the crisis. Cotton also became an important public voice and later argued, at least according to the account discussed, that spectral evidence should be used sparingly. The immediate crisis began in January 1692 when nine-year-old Betty Parris and eleven-year-old Abigail Williams, relatives living in the household of Salem Village minister Samuel Parris, began barking, convulsing, vomiting, and behaving in ways the adults considered physically abnormal. A doctor declared them bewitched. The hosts note that this first episode remains unexplained. Possible theories include ergot poisoning, encephalitis, or another biological illness combined with the girls’ experimentation with folk magic. Josh rejects the idea that the girls simply staged a short prank because their symptoms continued for a long time and because the practical, religious Puritans might have detected an ordinary hoax. Once the doctor used the word “witch,” the girls began naming suspects: Parris’s enslaved worker Tituba, followed by Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne. All three fit the established stereotype of marginal, poor, older women who might be accused of witchcraft.

The panic expanded as more girls and villagers claimed to be bewitched. The hosts say that people on the margins were particularly vulnerable: women or men who kept to themselves, lived independently, or had a reputation for using folk magic could quickly become suspects. Some accused people may have used threats of curses to pressure neighbors into giving them food or other necessities, which made the accusations seem superficially plausible to contemporaries even though the Puritan idea of a supernatural witch was not real. The jails soon filled with more than 100 accused people, and conditions were brutal. Prisoners were shackled on dirt floors and charged fees for their own shackles. Four-year-old Dorothy Good was arrested and held from roughly March until December, and Sarah Osborne died in jail. Another imprisoned woman gave birth, and her infant daughter was left in the jail with her and did not survive. These deaths occurred before the formal trials and hangings, during the escalating accusation stage alone. Increase Mather returned to Salem with the newly appointed governor, William Phips, and faced a choice: halt the proceedings and release the prisoners or create a legal mechanism to process them. Instead of stopping the panic, authorities established the special Court of Oyer and Terminer—literally a court to “hear and determine”—to clear the backlog. William Phips focused on the colony’s military dangers and delegated the court’s operation to Lieutenant Governor William Stoughton.

Stoughton’s decision to admit spectral evidence transformed the special court from a way to process prisoners into an engine of executions. Other forms of evidence included confessions, eyewitness testimony, and physical tests such as searching for a supposed “witch’s teat,” often a mole interpreted as a third nipple for an animal familiar. Spectral evidence was more powerful and more difficult to challenge: an accuser could claim that the defendant’s invisible spirit or specter had attacked them, or was present in the courtroom. An alibi became useless because prosecutors could answer that the accused had sent a spirit while physically remaining elsewhere. The hosts give an example of the absurdity: Philip English was accused after someone suffered a nosebleed while discussing a lawsuit involving him. Pets could be labeled animal familiars, and books about folk magic could be treated as evidence. Bridget Bishop was the first person executed, hanged on June 10, 1692, only a little more than a week after the court’s first trial on June 2. The speed of the proceedings meant that the panic was already producing deaths before more cautious residents could organize resistance. Giles Corey even testified against his wife, later recanted, and was himself accused; historians do not know why he initially implicated her. The hosts describe this as a period when adults allowed children’s accusations to overturn the normal social order, even though Puritan children were ordinarily expected to work, obey, and remain silent.

Salem’s breakdown became undeniable when respected community members were accused. Rebecca Nurse, described as one of the colony’s most upstanding Puritan women, was tried and executed. Her case suggested that if someone like Nurse could be a witch, then anyone could be one. The death toll is counted somewhat differently depending on what is included: 19 people were hanged, Giles Corey was tortured to death by pressing, and five people died in prison. Lydia Dustin remained jailed after the trials ended because she could not pay her fees, despite being exonerated, and died in March 1693. Corey’s death involved laying boards over his body and gradually adding weight because he refused to enter a plea. Standing mute could preserve an estate for heirs, but Corey reportedly wrote that he was refusing to cooperate because the proceedings were a sham. Sheriff George Corwin exploited the panic by confiscating accused people’s land and possessions, giving him an incentive to make more arrests. Corey cursed Corwin as he died; Corwin died of a heart attack before age 30, and a local legend says later Essex County sheriffs either died or resigned because of heart problems. After Corey’s death and growing resistance, Phips dissolved the Court of Oyer and Terminer, prohibited spectral evidence in the replacement court, and released or pardoned prisoners in early 1693. By late May, the jails held no more accused “witches.” Judge Samuel Sewall later publicly admitted his participation had been a grave mistake and asked his congregation for forgiveness.

The episode closes with a message from CJ Kerbo, who says their father introduced them to Stuff You Should Know when they were barely a teenager. Although CJ and their father have not always had an easy relationship and sometimes go months without seeing each other, asking whether the other has heard the latest episode gives them a reliable, low-pressure way to reconnect. CJ says the show is the only thing they have consistently been able to talk about and that listening is comforting when they miss their father. CJ also tells Chuck that he resembles their father so closely that the family jokes they would be best friends if they met, including having similar voices. They invite Josh and Chuck to dinner at their favorite fried catfish seafood restaurant if the hosts return to Austin. Chuck jokes that the email was partly memorable because he accidentally called it “fried cat food,” which made Josh laugh. The hosts thank CJ, say they may return to Austin, and invite listeners to write to the show at stuffpodcast@iHeartRadio.com.