Girls Bewitched In The Salem Witch Trials

Witches in Salem Massachusetts! In 1692 10 young girls got sick and no one knew what was going on including doctors. The main individuals involved were the girls that got sick and called witchcraft upon three other girls, The three individuals that were called out were Sarah Good, Sarah Osborn, and a Caribbean slave named Tituba. Let’s not forget Sir William Phipps the governor of Massachusetts.

People are getting hanged every month. I am so scared I might be hanged next month. I am in Salem, the year in 1692. I know the girls are faking it but, I am scared to death. We are all scared of them, all of us give them gifts and cookies. In the summer of 1692, Salem was in a dilemma. Girls took drugs from their slave and started to see things that weren’t actually there. They started The Salem Witch Trials of 1692. What caused 20 people to be hanged in Salem during the summer months of 1692? The Salem Witch Trials was caused by poor, young girls who acted possessed because they were jealous of the rich. The young girls didn’t wanted to be bossed around, drama queens pretend they have the devil inside them, and the poor people

 The Salem Witch Trial consisted of heinous accusations implicated by Cotton Mather which effected society as a hole and gave reasoning to the numerous amount of witch stories we hear today. Cotton Mather was the eldest son of Increase Mather, Massachusetts most influential and well known Puritan minister, and the grandson of John Cotton, Salem’s spiritual founder. Cotton Mather was born in Boston Massachusetts and attended Harvard University, receiving an honors degree from Glasgow University. Mather was pastor of Boston 's second protestant church and began his journey into politics in 1689.

In late winter and early spring of 1692, residents of Salem Village, Massachusetts, a thinly settled town of six hundred began to suffer from a strange physical and mental malady. Fits, hallucinations, temporary paralysis, and “distracted” rampages were suddeny occuring sporadically in the community. The livestock, too, seemed to suffer from the unexplainable illness. With the limited scientific and medical knowledge of the time, physicians who were consulted could only offer witchcraft as an explanation. Psychiatric disorder is used in a slightly different sense in the argument that the Witchcraft crisis was a consequence of two party factionalism in Salem Village in this account the girls are unimportant factors in the entire incident. Their behavior “served as the kind of Roschach test into which adults read their own concerns and expectations.” Possessed individuals exhibited learned behavior patterns and that words and actions varied only slightly among them. The affected women experienced an inner conflict which was explained by the ministers as a struggle between good and evil. As to the physical symptoms: the fits, trances, and paralyzed limbs, among others, Karlsen attributes them to the afflicted girls’ actual fear of witches as well as the idea that once they fell into an afflicted state they were free to express

After reading through the available information on the Salem witch trials, it would seem that the initial witch scare was caused by juvenile girls, capitalizing on the fears and superstition of the populace at the time. According to Professor Linder’s research, “Many people of the period complained that young people lacked the piety and sense of purpose of the founders’ generation.”(Linder) At first accusing women who they did not like and being supported by their prominent families, the juveniles found success to be easy. Additionally, the fact that the first accused were poor, not liked, and one being a slave, it stands to reason that not many in the community would have chanced besmirching their good names in the defense of the accused.

1692. The year of ill children, women fits of convulsion, and hallucinations. The year also consisted of swimming tests and prayer tests for women with English Puritan backgrounds. The Salem witch trials occurred in Massachusetts between 1692 and 1693. More than 300 people were accused of practicing witchcraft (the Devil 's magic). 20 woman were executed. Before all of this happened, life in Salem was like any normal day. Women and children had expectations as well as men did, you did not disobey God nor go against him, or act out of character. Life in the 1690’s was more of a man’s world and which always gave them the upper hand. Women were always looked down upon which gave men greater power. Unlike God’s followers (men), women were considered evil worshipers of the devil. During the trials, men proved that they really did have the upper hand.

For over 300 years there has been one question that scientist have not been able to come up with a widely accepted answer to. Why did the afflicted girls from the Salem Witch trials act how they did. Theories have ranged from faking, to sickness, to actual witchcraft. This paper will discuss some of the logical explanations for the girls actions. Some possible explanations for why the afflicted girls of salem acted how they did include mass hysteria, lifestyle, mass conversion disorder, ergot poisoning, and encephalitis lethargica.

Salem Witch Trials was a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in the Salem Village of the 17th century New England. The trials caused executions of many people, mostly women. Salem Witch Trials exposed the different gender roles during the seventeenth century. Women were supposed to take on “wifely duties” such as, be mothers and housewives. Women were taught to follow the men. There were strict religious norms during the seventeenth century. There was rigid moral code believed that God would punish sinful behavior. Those who were under the covenant by the church of the Salem Village believed that Satan would select those to fulfill his work and those who followed Satan were considered witches. Witchcraft was considered a punishable crime. Salem Witch Trials revealed that gender played a role for the accused and accusers. The trials also revealed that one’s relationship with God will set deliverance from Satan’s attacks. Salem Witch Trials demonstrated how rumors, jealousy, and the idea of male dominance affected people of the Salem Village.

It has been 324 years since the famous Salem Witch Trials took place. This began in 1692 when three of the village’s young women exhibiting strange behavior were accused of witchcraft and subjected to trial. A special court was established to conduct the trials with the first woman to be found guilty was Bridget Bishop. Bishop was sentenced to death by hanging at Salem’s Gallows Hill in June of 1692. In all, fourteen women and five men were found guilty of witchcraft and led to their deaths at Gallows Hill to be hanged. Of the 19, women outnumbered men three to one, an overwhelming majority.

Wasn’t attributable of a physical malady, the community reasoned that it must been According to Blumberg, the Salem of witch trails was a really bad part of the United State. There were people who didn’t understanding why they were getting accused. This happed during 1692 and 1693 in Massachusetts. This happened during this time. The main parts that started and fueled the trials were politics, religion, family, feuds, economics, and the imaginations and fears of people (Sutter). The seeds of the hysteria is afflicted Salem village, Massachusetts were sown on January 1692 when groups of young lady’s began to display wild behavior. The physicians called to examine the girls could find no cause of the disturbing behavior. If the source affliction the work of Satan. Witches invaded of Salem. February village began; raying and fasting in order to rid itself of the devil’s affect the girls were pressured to reveal who’s in the community controlled their behavior. March 11, 1692 there was a day of fasting and also, prayers in the Salem during the days of community’s ministers, the rev. Monday 21st on March magistrates of Salem appointed to come to examination of the goodwife Corey about twelve of the clock they went into the meeting house, which was thronged with the spectators (The Salem witch Trials). Ann Putnam Elizabeth Hubbard, Susannah Sheldon, and Mary Warren all charge they were, no longer friends they were not nice. “The girls complained into grotesque poses, fell

In the 1690s “The “afflicted” girls [whom] made the accusations were some of the most powerless members of their society” (“Part II: The Witches of Salem”). Salem Witch Trials quickly became famous and researchers began exploring the multiple possibilities behind the trials. Although many theories were considered, none could explain why so many were accused and hanged.

The year was 1692, when terror of witchcraft and the devil swept through the little Salem village. When the trials came about people turned on their enemies and even family turned on other family members with accusations of witchcraft. Throughout this process many people were hung or stoned to death because they were found guilty of having relations with the devil or for not admitting to witchcraft. Many books and articles have been published about the Salem witch trials but most of them were written in different ways by the approach the authors takes, how they interpret the information from that time period and the content they use. They also differ by the accounts they make towards certain individuals, along with the approach they take to tell what happened during the Salem witch trials. In the nonfiction book, The Devil In Massachusetts by Marion L. Starkey, she tells a dramatic story about what had happened before, during, and after the Salem witch trials, to make what she is saying more interesting. While compared to a nonfiction book, The Salem Wichcraft Trials: A Legal History written by a historian named Peter Charles Hoffer, where he is very straight forward because he uses factual evidence from primary and secondary source puritain writers and he gives those writers credit in his bibliographic essay.

Mid-January 1642, 9-year-old Betty Parris and 11-year-old Abigail Williams, with the help[ of the Parris slave Tituba, participated in an act that set off a spark that would start the Salem Witchcraft Hysteria. Wishing to know about their future, Betty and Abigail suspended a raw egg in a glass over a light.The images would act as messages and clues. Although this seems innocent enough after this “reading” they began to display unusual behavior associated with possession symptoms. This led to a full scale investigation and arrests of the slave Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborne under the charges of witchcraft. Tituba was the only one to confess, this confession unknowingly saved her from the gallows that Good and Osborne would soon meet. This first event led to hundreds of other trials and hunts that put both men and women into jail or even hung.

Life in the New England colonies during the 1600’s proved to be harsh with the constant fear of Native American attacks, scarce food, freezing winters, and conflicting opinions about religion. From this perpetual state of distress, the Salem Witch Trials were birthed, causing a wave of hysteria in Salem Village and Salem Town. Though the exact day and month is uncertain, historians can claim that the trials emerged in early 1692 and came to a close in 1693. The Salem Witch Trials started in 1692 with more than one hundred fifty people being accused of practicing witchcraft, and the trials finally ended with the courts declaring there was no evidence in the cases being tried, and the Governor stopped the trials because his wife was accused.

The residents of the village of Salem have what they believe is definitive and irrefutable proof that someone is bewitching these children and perhaps even the town itself. For them the question is not if it is happening but who is doing it. This was on the tail end of the Witchcraft craze that was sweeping through Europe where thousands of women accused of witchcraft were put to death because they were believed to be agents of the Devil causing harm to others through supernatural means. The craze started in the 1300’s and ended in the late 1600’s.(Blumberg, 2007) Even though overseas this was winding down, local events caused it to flourish.