Rosalyn Schanzer's Witches: The Absolutely True Tale Of Disaster In Salem

The Salem Witch Trials were a time of paranoia and mass hysteria. In this small town of Massachusetts hundreds were accused of witchcraft and 19 people were executed. Salem was home to very devout Puritans. The worries arrived when young girls would become sick with no explanation or cure. The doctors not knowing what the cause of the illness was, quickly pronounce the girls bewitched. It spread terror through the town. The girls, as well as other residents, started accusing others of witchery. Many accusations were because of vengeance or self-interest. There were rivalries between families over land or wealth. Neighbors started accusing each other in order to gain their land. The religious community had an intensified sense of fear that the Devil was walking among them. They believed witches were out to destroy the Puritans. In order to purify the village of evil they had trials for the accused.

In The witches Stacy Schiff starts off by giving accurate background information of what happened in Salem. Fourteen women and five men died in 1692 because of the witch trials. Then Schiff starts to get in to detail. In the village minister’s house, the two little girls crawled under the furniture it was a great hassle to get them out, they would make made silly noises, spread their arms out like wings and pretended they could fly. Betty Parris nine years old who was the parson’s daughter, and cousin Abigail Williams who was eleven years old. These actions were absurd hence they have always been exemplary children. Soon enough comments began to spread through Salem: The children had been bewitched. Then Clergymen started coming then the

The Salem Witch Trials was from 1692-1693, in the town of Salem, Massachusetts. There was a circle of girls who wanted to have a little fun so they got involved in the sport of witchcraft. They went to the minister’s house every day to visit Tituba, the Caribbean slave, to join her for palm and tea leaf reading. The girls took it too far though. They pretended to have fits and started accusing people of being witches. They went so far that people started to be hung for being witches but they weren’t. The girls didn’t understand that what they were doing was wrong. But then it got worse… the girls started to believe their own lies. Salem was doomed… after the girls began to think that what they said was true…

My third cause of the trials are anger. My accusations were out of pure revenge. Some accusers just got back at people they didn’t like by accusing them of being conjurers which got those people hanged. “everyone got in on the act. Brothers accused brothers, Neighbors accused neighbors” (Schanzer 55). When the end of the the end of the trials got closer the citizens of Salem turned on each other and it basically turned into a free-for all of accusations. “Sarah Cloyce (Nurse's sister) and Elizabeth (Bassett) Proctor were arrested in April, they were brought before John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin,”(Wikipedia/Salem Witch Trials). These two women were accused of being witches by people that they knew and trusted.

National Geographic writer Rosalyn Schanzer has written a terrifying but true story known by the name Witches!; The Absolutely True Tale Of Disaster In Salem. In the town of Salem, Massachusetts, in 1692 two girls started to have unexplained fits and lead the town into chaos. The answer that the people came up with was witchcraft. Everyone starts to accuse their friends and family, making them go to trial and it already has lead to the deaths of many people. The trials were very unfair using spectral evidence, the close-minded judges, and the false accusations.

Stacy Schiff’s national bestseller The Witches highlights the suspicions, betrayals and hysteria of the Salem Witch Trials. In 1692, the commonwealth of Massachusetts executed five men, fourteen women, and two dogs for witchcraft. One might wonder how and why this Puritan colony became so caught up in this witch frenzy. In this book she is able to paint a clear picture of the panic that occurred among the people of Salem.

The witch trials of Salem are often thought to be a hysteria that can be categorized as fake and sometimes “crazy”. The trials started by the belief of the supernatural and the practice of the devil’s ability to grant people the ability to hurt others. Elizabeth Parris and Abigail Williams are the two young ladies that began the stereotypical beliefs in witchery. Williams and Parris started having hysterical fits and “uncontrollable” tantrums filled with screaming and crazy-like seizures. The result of all the insane opinions and conclusions to society were nineteen hangings, and one pressing. The Salem witch trials were a result of hasty decisions and the fear of God’s anger on the people of society. Today, the trials would be seen as crazy or fictional.

In the rigid year of 1692, many men, women and children were put to death because they were believed to be witches and that they were taking part in the practice of witchcraft. The place where it occurred in is a small Puritan community of Salem Village. Witchcraft was forbidden to practice in the small town of Salem by the Puritans. It all started when a group of girls gathered in the home of Reverend Parris to listen to stories told by a slave (Salem). Along with listening to the stories, they also took part in playing fortune-telling games, which were strictly forbidden by the Puritans. Many people in the community believed that they were victims of witchcraft because of what they did and experienced and they were frightened by this thought. This event is what kick-started the Salem witch Trials in a small Puritan

In the 1680’s and 1690’s there was mass hysteria in New England over supposed witchcraft. The most famous outbreak was in Salem, Massachusetts, hence the name Salem Witch Trials. In Salem, there were young girls who started acting strangely, and they leveled accusations of witchcraft against some of the West Indian servants who were immersed in voodoo tradition. Most of the accusations were against women, and soon the accusations started to shift to the substantial and prominent women. Neighbors accused other neighbors, husbands accused their wives, etc. and it kept going on for a while. There was this nature of evil and the trials didn’t end until nineteen Salem residents were put to death in 1692, more importantly before the girls

The hysteria, craze, trials, and deaths, still rest an unsolved case. The theories of politics, rivalries, religion and the “circle girls” seem the most believable, in my eyes. However, as the happenings in Salem village still continue to mislead and amaze not only historians, but many others, the witch trials lie a great turning point for Salem, and the lives of many; let alone

The Salem Witch Trials of 1692 were a series of prosecutions of people who were accused of acts of witchcraft or of being a witch in Salem, Massachusetts through the time period of February 1692 through May 1693. This was a dark time in history as more than 200 prosecutions took place and at least 20 people were killed during this time of fear and hysteria. The accusations began as three girls Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborne were accused of witchcraft from other young girls in the community. During this time period, fear of the Devil was common as people in Salem were very devoted to their religion and religious practices. As one of the accused girls, Tituba, confessed to working for the Devil and admitting to being a witch, this caused panic and hysteria as a massive witch hunt took place to find more of these witches. This confession was the main reason behind months and months of fear and mass panic as it triggered more accusations.

In the Delusion of Satan: The Full Story of the Salem Witch Trials, Frances Hill, write the time period there were accusations that lead to the witch trials and executions in Salem Valley. “By studying what happen in Salem in detail, we can learn some valuable but painful lessons about the darkness and perversity of the human heart, and about some of the articular dilemmas that continued to afflict the Western spirt.”

In 1692 in Salem, Massachusetts, hysteria broke out throughout the town in an event that later became known as the Salem Witch Trials. They were the largest account of witch hangings ever in America, as 20 women and men were put to death for being accused of practicing witchcraft. Historians have been debating about how these trials were caused. The frenzy in Salem happened because at first, young girls were afraid of punishment and wanted to avoid it so they blamed older women and accused them of being witches. These accusations began to spiral out of control when the religion of the town supported the allegations, which causes paranoia and panic to spread throughout Salem, which blinded the townspeople from clues revealing that the

Many people know of the Salem witch trials that took place in Salem, Massachusetts in the year 1692 spilling over into the year 1693. But for those who do not know, the Salem witch trials were a series of trials against men, women, and children accused of being a witch and or practicing witchcraft. In “The Devils Snare: The Salem Witch Trials of 1692” by Mary Beth Norton, the author recollects the stories of real life accounts of those accusers and the accused in Salem during that time. Mary Beth Norton explains the Salem witch trials differently than other books and articles by giving wide-ranging background on incidents leading toward the trials and how events in history were related to the trials.

The largest outbreak of witchcraft in America took place in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692. A group of girls, including the Parris’s Indian slave Tituba, gathered in the Salem village and were attempting to see the future by decoding “messages”. Shortly after this gathering the girls started showing signs of the possessed (pg. 73). To this day people all over America are still amazed with the events that took place in this time. But why is that? The fear of the village fell heavily onto the judicial system, which later made people focus on the proper separation of government and religious beliefs. Mass hysteria broke out amongst the village and many people were being accused, therefore leading to many innocent deaths. Although there could be many theories as to the reason the witch trials in Salem began, there are two points of view that are very commonly shared amongst people. Some believe that the Salem witch trials were women unconsciously searching for power, whereas others believe it was an encephalitis epidemic.