Tag Archives: Sarah Osborne

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May 10: ***Sensitive Content*** DEAD: the sickly Sarah Osborne; ARRESTED: the abusive George Jacobs Sr. DISTRAUGHT: the servant Sarah Churchill

Today in Salem: The Boston jail keeper is wrestling with Sarah Osborne’s shackles and irons, trying to remove them from her motionless legs. She’s been chained for 9 weeks, and has spent most of that time lying in a pile of dirty straw, coughing day and night. This morning, though, they’d found her dead, probably of jail fever, and the only sound is the clanking of the chains as she’s finally released.

The beggar Sarah Good is also chained, and now she clutches her baby and turns away as much as she can. The baby is thin, and when she cries she sounds more like a little cat than an infant. Now she mewls when Sarah presses into her and hides her away. There are some things even a baby shouldn’t see.

“Length of Confinement: 9 weeks, 2 days,” the jail keeper later writes in his log. “Unpaid Fees: 1 pound, 3 shillings.” It’s unclear who will pay it.

Meanwhile, the extremely tall and abusive George Jacobs Sr. has stumped into the courtroom in Salem with his two walking sticks. He was arrested just this morning, and now he’s standing in front of a judge with hardly a chance to gather his wits.

The afflicted girls are there, of course, greeting him with their usual wails and torments. He’s seen through them since the start, even shouting in a crowd once that the afflicted girls were lying. And now here they are, with Sarah Churchill – his own servant – standing at the front.

Jacobs guffaws at the judges’ first words.

“Your worships, all of you, do you think this is true?” he asks. They bounce the question back to him. What does he think? “I am as innocent as the child born tonight,” he says, leaning on his sticks.

The magistrates bear down, quizzing the girls, batting away Jacobs’ protests, and asking him to answer to their accusations. Over and over Jacobs says it’s not him, that the Devil is using Jacobs’ specter as a disguise.

“The Devil can take any likeness!” he says. But the magistrates are firm in their response: While that may be true, Jacobs must give his permission for the Devil to impersonate him.

When Jacobs is unable to say the Lord’s Prayer without a mistake – and he makes plenty of them – the judges decide there’s much more to explore. They’ve run out of time, though, so they send him to jail to wait for more questioning tomorrow.

Outside the courtroom, two women find Jacobs’ servant Sarah Churchill sobbing.

“I’ve undone myself,” she cries, and looks at the floor. Just yesterday she’d confessed to witchcraft, but had found a delicate middle ground by blaming Jacobs for forcing her to. But it was a lie, she says now. She’s never signed the Devil’s book, and Jacobs has never asked her to.

The women are shocked. “Why did you confess then? Why would you condemn yourself?”

Sarah paces back and forth, crying and wringing her hands. She was afraid not to confess. And now she’ll never be able to take it back. If she told the authorities only once that she’d signed the Devil’s book, they would believe her. If she told the truth a hundred times now, they would not.

WHY is this important?

First, when most people hear about the Salem Witchcraft Trials, they think of hangings (and rightfully so). But several other people died as well, albeit less dramatically. Sarah Osborne’s death is the first one associated with the Trials, and kicks off the next tragic chapter.

Second, George Jacobs Sr.’s testimony planted a powerful question that shaped the Trials until the end. Can the Devil use someone’s specter to disguise himself? If so, then “spectral evidence,” which was used to execute 20 people, was useless. If it’s not your specter – it’s actually the Devil – you cannot be held accountable for it.

The judges’ response — The Devil needs permission to use a person’s specter — kept spectral evidence in play, and gave the judges more power. The only way to give the Devil that permission is if you are already partnering with him. Therefore you agree to the evil he’s going to inflict. You can be held accountable for that.

Finally, Sarah Churchill’s affliction, followed by her confession, shows a growing realization among the people who were accused:

  • If they confessed, their lives would be saved (or at least prolonged). The judges were trying to identify witches. Who better to recognize them than other witches? So it was useful to the judges to keep the confessors alive.
  • If they said they were innocent, they would probably be executed. The judges assumed from the start that anyone who was accused was guilty. Unless they could prove their innocence – which no one could, since it was their supposed specters committing evil – they would die.

Sarah lied because she wanted to live. To Puritans, though, dying (and therefore meeting God) with a lie in your heart was akin to eternal damnation. Sarah realized she’d condemned herself and George Jacobs Sr. at the same time, and there was no way out.

Tomorrow in Salem: CLOSING RANKS: the afflicted girls snare the shrew Alice Parker and the healer Ann Pudeator

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Mar 13: NEWLY ACCUSED: the beloved Rebecca Nurse

Today in Salem: 12-year-old Ann Putnam is caught in the crosshairs. On one side is her mother, pregnant and fearful, demanding to know what specter Ann can see. On the other side is the family’s 18-year-old servant, Mercy Lewis, who’s spent the last two weeks witnessing Ann’s torments and accusations. Who? Who is tormenting you this time?

dying flower

Her grandmother’s empty rocking chair is across the room, and now Ann says she can see a pale old woman sitting in it. But she doesn’t know who it is. Mercy and Ann’s mother lean into Ann’s face. ”Look again,” her mother says, barely breathing. “You must know,” Mercy says.

Maybe, Ann says, it’s hazy but she might remember where the old woman sits in the meeting house. Ann’s mother sits back and thinks. Maybe it’s one of the women who’ve already been accused. But Tituba is enslaved, and sits in the balcony where Ann wouldn’t see her. The beggar Sarah Good and the sickly Sarah Osborne don’t go to church, so they wouldn’t have been in the meeting house at all. That leaves the gospel woman Martha Corey, who attends church weekly without fail. It must be Martha.

“Martha Corey!” Ann’s mother says. “It must be her.” But no, Ann says. Between them, Mercy and Ann’s mother can see every person in the meeting house, with Mercy sitting in the balcony with the other servants and slaves, and the Putnam family sitting on the main floor. Now they tick off the name of each woman they’ve seen in meeting until Ann finally agrees wearily to one: the beloved Rebecca Nurse.

Ann’s mother sits back and thinks. Of course. Rebecca is beloved, even saintly. But her husband has been no end of trouble, arguing about land boundaries and recently even winning a well-known dispute in court against one of his neighbors. People say he’s been crowing about it, making sure his other neighbors know where his other boundaries lay, and daring them to push back. It’s easy to believe the Nurses have aligned themselves with the Devil.

WHO was Mercy Lewis?

A traumatized orphan and refugee of the Indian Wars in Maine. She was a servant in the powerful Putnam family. Mercy accused 9 people of witchcraft, testified in 16, and appeared with the other afflicted girls in several more.

Mercy was born and raised in Falmouth, Maine, where her village was decimated by Indian attacks that, early in her childhood, took her grandparents and cousins. Then, when she was 15 or 16, another brutal attack burned her village to the ground and killed most of its people, including Mercy’s parents.

Mercy and the few other survivors took refuge on an island, where the minister George Burroughs took her in as a servant. He was known to be verbally abusive to his wives, both of whom had died years earlier, and he may have been a harsh taskmaster. Perhaps that explains why Mercy would later accuse him of witchcraft.

Over the next few years Mercy served the Burroughs family, then an unknown home in Beverly, Massachusetts, and then finally the Putnam family in Salem Village. It was here that she befriended the 12-year-old Ann Putnam, and began suffering with fits and seizures. Today we might say Mercy had PTSD.

Once the trials were over, Mercy moved 50 miles north to Greenland, New Hampshire to live with her aunt. There she gave birth to an illegitimate child, married a man with the last name Allen, and moved away, probably to Boston. History loses track of her after that. Case files: Mercy Lewis

WHO was Rebecca Nurse?

A weak grandmother and much beloved member of the church. The accusations against her planted the first seeds of doubt in the trials.

Some historians speculate that a handful of women in the Village were suspicious of Rebecca because all eight of her children had survived to adulthood. This was unusual in a time of high infant mortality and diseases like smallpox.

It’s more likely that the animosity stemmed from years of land disputes between Rebecca’s father and then husband against other families, including the Putnams, who were the most powerful family in the Village. Most recently, the Nurse family had been part of a long and loud boundary dispute with a neighbor who claimed that some of the Nurses’ 300 acres were his. The dispute ended up in the General Court, where the neighbor lost, bitterly. The truth was more complicated, though. The Nurses didn’t own their farm; they mortgaged it. So it wasn’t the Nurses who’d won in court and insulted the neighbor: it was the farm’s owner. Still, many people believed it was the Nurse family who’d been so stubborn and argumentative. Case files: Rebecca Nurse 

Tomorrow in Salem: AFFLICTED: the refugee Mercy Lewis

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Mar 10: The bossy gospel woman Martha Corey

black cat

Today in Salem: The two Sarahs are still tightly chained to the wall of their Boston jail cell, and so are their specters. You cannot chain the Devil, though, and now he’s using the specter of the bossy Martha Corey to torture the girls’ leader Ann Putnam. The specter is furious that Ann has accused Martha’s fellow witches the slave Tituba, the beggar Sarah Good, and the sickly Sarah Osborne.

Martha’s specter is an extreme version of Martha herself, who’s always quick to say what she thinks and correct others’ mistakes. She’s always right, in her opinion, and refers to herself as a Gospel Woman; after all, she’s been a full member of the church for two years.

Martha is not without sin, though, and everyone knows it. More than 20 years ago, Martha gave birth to an illegitimate, mixed-race son. He still lives with Martha and her husband Giles, and the gossiping villagers have never stopped talking about it.

LEARN MORE: Was there racism in Salem?

Yes. When the witchcraft hysteria began, the first enslaved people had been brought to the new world 170 years earlier. So racial division and slavery were already firmly in place in New England. But when the West Indian Tituba confessed to witchcraft, it electrified the racial questions around her and other enslaved people. They had dark skin. Many of them had foreign accents and frightening folklore. And now, it seemed, at least one of them was in league with the Devil.

In addition, the colonists were terrified of Native Americans, who also had dark skin and accents. Allied with the French, with both intent on rousting England’s presence, the Native Americans were brutal in their attacks on the English colonists. Many in Salem had lost family members or friends, sometimes watching them die in horrific ways. During the trials, when witnesses said they’d had visions or nightmares about black men, it was Native Americans they were referring to.

WHO was Martha Corey?

As a young woman, Martha had an illegitimate son who was of mixed race. She named him Benoni, meaning “son of my sorrow,” a name usually reserved for babies whose mothers had died in childbirth. Martha lived with “Ben” in a boarding house for several years before she was married for the first time.

words from Martha Corey's examination
From a deposition against Martha Corey, filed during her examination

When her first husband died, Martha married Giles Corey, 80. Her mixed-race son, now 22, was living with them at the time of the trials.

Martha had joined the church two years before the trials began, and had referred to herself as a Gospel Woman ever since. She could be condescending, and was quick to state her opinions. She was respected but disliked, and her scandalous past counted against her. Case files: Martha Corey

Tomorrow in Salem: AWAY with little Betty

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Mar 9: CHAINED: Good & Osborne

ankle chains

Today in Salem: The jail keeper drops eight pounds of chains at the feet of the beggar Sarah Good. Stand back, he says, and pushes her against the wall. Sarah is spitting mad, but she can’t kick, and she won’t drop the baby. All she can do is unleash a string of curses as the jail keeper yanks the shackles tight, then locks them to a hook in the wall.

Until last night the magistrates had assumed that a jail cell would contain the witches and their specters. But after last night’s torments they know that a jail cell isn’t enough. The women may be locked in a cell, but their specters are traveling freely and inflicting great harm. So they’ve told the jail keeper to physically attach the women to the jail cell wall. That should keep their specters at bay.

The jail keeper drops another eight pounds of chains in front of the sickly Sarah Osborne, but she’s too ill to put up a fight. She slides down to sit, then leans against the wall. As weak as she is, though, the jail keeper is still rough as he pulls and locks the shackles. He’s no fool. She may be sick, but her specter is not.

The slave Tituba stands to the side. She doesn’t need to be attached to the walls; her specter didn’t torment the girls last night. Why would she? Tituba has no cause to be vengeful or angry with them. They didn’t testify against her. She’s already confessed.

LEARN MORE: Why were there babies in jail?

History doesn’t tell us why Sarah Good had her baby with her. But we do know that her baby, 5 months old, was still nursing. Puritans were strict about mothers nursing their own babies rather than using a wet nurse; in fact, Cotton Mather, a prominent minister of the time, later wrote that women who refused to suckle their infants are “dead while they live.”

Still, wet nurses were used in Puritan society during the first few days of a child’s life, until the mother was no longer producing colostrum (which the Puritans believed was poisonous, or at least impure). A wet nurse would also be required in the case of maternal death, or other extreme circumstances. But prison probably wasn’t one of them, especially for a beggar.

Tomorrow in Salem: The bossy gospel woman Martha Corey

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Mar 5: CHOICES: The beggar Sarah Good

Today in Salem: The sickly Sarah Osborne will almost certainly be condemned. The only thing standing between her and the hangman’s noose is a trial, which to the magistrates is just a technicality. She’s guilty, they know she is. But they’ve given up waiting for her to admit it, and it was up to God whether to forgive her.

The magistrates have not, however, given up on the pipe-smoking beggar Sarah Good, and now they’re at the jail one last time to pull a confession from her. They know she’s guilty, of course, and just like Osborne she says she’s innocent. But where Osborne is steadfast, Good is evasive, slippery even, and the details of her story keep changing. She’s hiding something. Why does she hurt the children? they ask her. Has she signed the Devil’s book? What evil spirit is she familiar with?

woman peeking through hole

Sarah peers at them through her pipe smoke and laughs, her voice gravelly and hoarse from too many years with a pipe between her teeth. The cruel magistrate Hathorne steps forward and narrows his eyes against the sting of the smoke.

“Will you not profess your guilt?” he asks. It’s a simple choice.

If she confesses, she will live.

If she says she’s innocent, she will die.

Which will she choose?

LEARN MORE: This seems backward. If a crime leads to the death penalty, you wouldn’t confess to it, like Tituba did. You’d deny it, like the two Sarahs. Why was this reversed in Salem? Why were the judges so eager to execute an innocent like Sarah, but slow to condemn a confessor like Tituba?

At the time of the Trials, the Puritan ministers of New England were convinced that the Church had become complacent. They’d worried for weeks that God was about to punish them by allowing attacks from the Devil. Entire congregations had been fasting and praying about it, and the ministers were on high alert for any sign of evil.

When the news exploded that a group of girls could see the specters of witches, the source of the evil was revealed. But the girls weren’t the only ones who could see into the “Invisible World.” Witches could also see and identify each other to the authorities. The longer the confessed witches were alive, the more of their evil friends they could expose.

Tituba was the first of several accused “witches” to realize that she could save her life by confessing, then describing in great detail what – and who – she could see. Those who maintained their innocence either hadn’t figured it out or would rather die than tell a lie.

Tomorrow in Salem: ACCUSED: the quarrelsome Elizabeth Proctor

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Mar 3: Dorcas, the tiniest witch

broken doll

Today in Salem: The three accused witches are finally behind bars, and 9-year-old little Betty, the tomboy Abigail Williams, and the 17-year-old servant Elizabeth Hubbard are feeling somewhat better.

Ann Putnam is still tormented, though, this time by the specters of a woman and a little girl. Ann doesn’t know who the woman is, but she recognizes the girl: It’s the beggar Sarah Good’s 4-year-old daughter, Dorcas. Sarah has her baby in jail with her, but has left Dorcas behind in the care of her hapless father.

Can it be? Is it possible for a small child to be a witch? If any child could be, it would be Dorcas. In the best of times Dorcas is a wild child, dirty, disheveled, and often hungry. Now, though, with her mother gone, the little girl is frightened and furious, and her specter bites, pinches, and chokes Ann in revenge.

Meanwhile the magistrates are interviewing the three imprisoned witches at the jail. It doesn’t matter that the two Sarahs have denied being in league with the Devil. The magistrates know they’re guilty, and they must confess.

The beggar Sarah Good has been brought back to Salem, and now she’s twisted at an awkward angle, nursing her baby in one arm. The other is bruised and swollen from leaping off the constable’s horse, and she holds it close, as if it’s in an imaginary sling. In another corner of the jail cell, the sickly Sarah Osborne is sleeping in dirty straw, breathing shallowly. The cruel magistrate John Hathorne prods her with his foot until she rolls over to look at him.

“What promise have you made to the Devil?” He looks back and forth to each of them. None, they both say at the same time. “Have you signed his book? Tell the truth!” The beggar just laughs and holds her baby closer. The sickly Sarah Osborne sighs. No, they say.

As for the slave Tituba, she’s been pacing in a small circle all day. She’s already confessed, but to prove her worth, she adds a new detail: when the previous minister’s wife and child died, it was because of witchcraft.

LEARN MORE: What was the jail in Salem like?

The Salem “Gaol” was only eight years old when the witchcraft trials began. The floor was dirt, and the windows had iron bars. But we don’t know much more about the building, except that it was described as “thirteen feet stud, and twenty feet square, accommodated with a yard.” It’s hard to translate that into today’s measurements. Was the facade of the building 20 square feet? Or did that refer to the length and width? Did it have two stories? What was the distance between studs? Was it built of stone or wood? We know it had a yard, but was it secured to the exterior of the building, or was it a central courtyard?

The most important thing we know is that the conditions were appalling. It was hot in the summer and cold in the winter, and smelled of dung, vomit, dead vermin, and unwashed bodies year-round. It was miserably overcrowded, and prisoners were infested with fleas and lice thanks to vermin, which spread “jail fever” (typhus). An earlier prisoner said he was “almost poisoned with the stink of my own dung and the stink of the prison having never so much as a minute’s time to take the air since I came into this dolesome place.”

WHO was Dorcas Good? Dorcas was the 4-year-old daughter of the beggar Sarah Good. Dorcas was accused of witchcraft, like her mother, and confessed that her mother had given her a little snake that sucked on her finger. The magistrates took this to mean she had a “familiar” and was, therefore, guilty. Dorcas stayed in prison for eight months and was emotionally damaged for the rest of her life.

Tomorrow in Salem: Choices: the beggar Sarah Good

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Feb 28-29: Parris beats a confession out of Tituba

powder burst

Today in Salem: Rev Parris’s hands are red and swollen from beating his slave Tituba. Parris is done, done with waiting and praying. Little Betty and her cousin the tomboy Abigail are growing worse, not better, and now he’s beaten a confession out of Tituba. Yes. Yes, she’s a witch, she cries. Not just that, but so are the beggar Sarah Good and the sickly Saran Osborne, plus two other witches she doesn’t recognize.

Parris relays the confession to a church deacon, who enlists three other men to ride to town and file complaints against Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborne. Warrants are immediately issued for their arrest, with orders to appear tomorrow morning for a hearing.

Tonight, according to the girls, the beggar Sarah Good’s specter torments the 17-year-old servant Elizabeth Hubbard. The specter of the sickly Sarah Osborne manifests as a human-headed bird and torments Betty, age 9, and Abigail, age 11. And the specters of Osborne and Tituba try to cut off 12-year-old Ann Putnam’s head.

LEARN MORE: How could Rev Parris beat his slave? Wasn’t slavery just during the Civil War?

No. The first enslaved Africans were brought to America more than 150 years before the witchcraft trials, and nearly 300 years before the U.S. Civil War.

The Body of Liberties title page
The Massachusetts Body of Liberties of 1641 was the first legal code established in New England. It outlawed slavery but legalized the slave trade at the same time.

About 50 years before the trials, the Puritans outlawed slavery with two exceptions: prisoners of war (most often Native Americans), and strangers who were sold to them or sold themselves. So, ironically, the very law that outlawed slavery also legalized the slave trade between America, the West Indies, and Africa.

In Salem at the time, we know of at least five enslaved people: In the Parris household were Tituba and John Indian with their daughter Violet, who’s age and birthplace are unknown. Two other women, Mary Black and Candy, both named in the trials, were enslaved by other families.

While Rev Parris “owned” Tituba because of legal loopholes, beating her was immoral and outside the law. In fact, the Puritan minister Cotton Mather later promised that if owners mistreated their slaves, “the Sword of Justice” would sweep through the colony.

Tomorrow in Salem: IN COURT: the beggar Sarah Good, the sickly Sarah Osborne, & the slave Tituba

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Feb 23: Another church truant: the fornicating Sarah Osborne

Fist and contract

Today in Salem: Fornication is not Sarah Osborne’s biggest scandal or sin. Neither is marrying her younger servant, or even skipping church (for 3 years, no less). No. God will certainly punish her for her wickedness; in fact, God’s displeasure might be why He allows her husband to beat her.

The worst sin, the thing that lies like bedrock under everything else, is the way she’s deceiving and stealing from her two sons. Or at least she’s trying to. When her first husband died he’d left 150 acres to Sarah, in trust until their sons came of age. But now that she’s remarried, she and her former servant are trying to break the trust, to keep the land for themselves.

Unfortunately for her, the Putnams had been the executors of her first husband’s will, and they were none too pleased that she was breaking the agreement. Now she’s earned more than God’s wrath. She’s also offended the powerful Putnam family, and the disagreement has been going on for so long that it’s hard to imagine the end of it.

Tituba, the Parris family slave, has been to one of the Putnam houses for a basket of salted fish. Now, on her way back to the parsonage, she passes the Osborne house, so still that it almost seems empty. It isn’t though. Caught between the Putnams and the parsonage, human judgment and God’s wrath, the Osborne family waits, unsure how the dispute will end.

LEARN MORE: Who were the Puritans? Were they really that harsh?

Puritan Bible
The Geneva Bible was published in 1560 by English reformers who fled to the continent to escape persecutions by Queen Mary. It was used by the Pilgrims and Puritans in New England until it was gradually replaced by the King James Bible.

The Puritans were protestants who wanted to purify the Church of England. They believed it was too similar to the Catholic Church, and should eliminate ceremonies and practices not rooted in the Bible.

The people of Salem were Puritans. But they weren’t the dour, unhappy people we think of today. In fact, Puritans sometimes wore colorful clothes; drank rum, brandy, and hard cider; and enjoyed (marital) sex. But they were disciplined about indulging in these things too much. Every part of life was grounded in Scripture, and anything that brought too much joy could distract a person from work or prayer, the two most important parts of life.

The people who were hanged in Salem covered the spectrum of Puritanism, from disreputable beggars to full members of the church – even a minister. It introduced disturbing questions. Was it even possible for a member of the church to partner with the Devil? If Scripture said the Devil could use people’s specters as a disguise, did that mean innocent people had been executed? If the Devil was invading the church, what sin had the community committed to deserve it?


WHO was Sarah Osborne?

Age 49. Osborne was a social outcast who’d married her own servant, and was rumored to have committed fornication with him. She was also sickly, of a nervous temperament, and hadn’t been to church in more than three years.

Osborne was also disliked by the Putnams. When her first husband died, he left his land to Sarah to be held in trust until their two sons were of age. Two of his Putnam brothers-in-law were the executors of the estate.

Several years later, Sarah purchased her own servant’s indenture, then married him. They then went to court to try to break the trust and gain control of the property. The Putnams were deeply offended; in fact, of the four people who’d signed the complaint resulting in her arrest, two of them were Putnams.

Sarah Osborne was the first victim of the witchcraft hysteria, dying in jail after nine weeks of being chained. Case files: Sarah Osborne

Tomorrow in Salem: Under an evil hand: the young Betty Parris & tomboy Abigail Williams