Today in Salem: The gale-force wind continues, blustering north through the streets of Boston, out of the town, over the roiling water, and through the marshes into Salem Village. Heavy clouds hang over naked trees that moan and sway in the gusts, carrying the vengeful specters of the beggar Sarah Good and the sickly Sarah Osborne. The women are locked in the Boston jail, 20 miles away from Salem Village. But their specters are here, bent on revenge, twisting and choking the girls who dared to testify against them.
The meeting house is in disrepair, and now a board is pried loose in the wind, sailing into the air and smashing against the wall of the parsonage. Inside, little Betty jumps at the sound and nearly faints, then bursts into tears before bending backward and twisting hard toward the fireplace.
11-year-old tomboy Abigail Williams isn’t much better, grasping the table, sobbing and choking at the same time. Across the village at the Putnam home, the 12-year-old Ann is flailing her arms and yelling at the specters that she will not, will not follow them. And, at the home of Dr. Griggs, his 17-year-old servant Elizabeth Hubbard is staring at the hearth fire, wide-eyed and seemingly in a trance, unmoving, even when the wood snaps and an ember flies toward her.
LEARN MORE: Were the afflicted girls really having “fits,” or were they faking it?
Probably both, sometimes maliciously, but also because of stress, past trauma, fear, boredom, and perhaps mass hysteria.
Of the ten main accusers, at least two and probably more were traumatized refugees from the Indian Wars in Maine. These were teenage girls and young women who’d watched as their homes and towns were burned and their family members murdered brutally. The attacks were not small or isolated. In one campaign, 60 miles of Maine coastland were destroyed in five weeks, with not one English settlement left.
Today we would say these girls had PTSD. But the Puritan Church of the time believed that dreams and nightmares carried messages and prophesies. One can only imagine what kind of dreams or even hallucinations these girls were having, and what they were told they meant.
Consider, too, that at least four of the girls – some of them refugees – were orphans who’d lost their parents, and therefore their financial and emotional support, dowries, and social connections. Puritan culture required each person to be “attached” to a family unit. So the orphan was taken in, frequently by extended family, and treated as a servant. Overnight these girls had lost their prospects. They’d never be married, never have children, and never have status in the church. They would be servants forever. Some of these hopeless girls had nothing else to lose, and may have been vengeful or uncaring.
On a larger level, the entire community was suffering tremendous anxiety. They were at war with the Indians, believed that Satan was active and intent on destroying them, and had just endured a brutally cold winter. Even the youngest accuser, age 9, would have picked up on that level of turmoil.
Still, despite any compassionate context, it’s true that some fakery was at play, with staged injuries, dramatic acting, and obvious teamwork. One accuser eventually confessed that she’d lied, and two of them joked that they just wanted to have fun. It was complicated, but not, and leaves us with questions we’ll never be able to answer fully.
