The Salem Witch Trials, begun in 1692 (also known as the Salem witch hunt and the Salem Witchcraft Episode), resulted in a number of convictions and executions for witchcraft in both Salem Village and Salem Town, Massachusetts. Some have argued it was the result of a period of factional infighting and Puritan witch hysteria. The trials resulted in the executions of 20 people (14 women, 6 men) and the imprisonment of between 175 and 200 people. In addition to those executed, at least five people died in prison. One man who refused to plead to the charges was pressed to death with rocks (the medieval torture of peine forte et dure, which, if fatal, did not result in forfeiture of property).Background

In 1692, Salem Village was torn by internal disputes between neighbors who disagreed about the choice of Samuel Parris as their first ordained minister. In January 1692, York, at the “Eastward” frontier of Maine, was attacked by the Abenaki Indians, and many of its citizens were massacred or taken captive, echoing the brutality of King Philip’s War of 1675-76.

Increasing family size fueled disputes over land between neighbors and within families, especially on the frontier where the economy was based on farming. Changes in the weather or blights could easily wipe out a year’s crop. A farm that could support an average-sized family could not support the many families of the next generation, prompting farmers to push further into the wilderness to find farmland and encroach upon the indigenous peoples there. As the Puritans had vowed to create a theocracy in this new land, religious fervor added another tension to the mix. Losses of crops, of livestock, and of children, as well as earthquakes and bad weather were typically attributed to the wrath of God. Within the Puritan faith, one’s soul was considered predestined from birth as to whether it had been chosen for Heaven or condemned to Hell. Puritans constantly searched for hints to this predestination, assuming God’s pleasure and displeasure could be read in signs given in the visible world. The invisible world was inhabited by God and the angels, including the Devil, a fallen angel. To Puritans, this invisible world was as real to them as the visible one around them.

The patriarchal beliefs that Puritans held in the community added further stresses. Women, they believed, should be totally subservient to men. By nature a woman was more likely to enlist in the Devil’s service than a man was, and that women were naturally lustful.

In addition, the small-town atmosphere made secrets very difficult to keep and people’s opinions about their neighbors were generally accepted as fact. In an age where the philosophy “children should be seen and not heard” was taken at face value, children were at the bottom of the social ladder. Toys and games were seen as idle and playing was discouraged. Girls had additional restrictions heaped upon them. Boys were able to go hunting, fishing, exploring in the forest, and often became apprentices to carpenters and smiths, while girls were trained from a tender age to spin yarn, cook, sew, weave, and to generally be servants to their husbands and mothers to their children.Origin of trials

In the village of Salem in 1692, Betty Parris, age 9, and her cousin Abigail Williams, age 11, the daughter and niece (respectively) of Reverend Samuel Parris, fell victim to what was recorded as fits “beyond the power of Epileptic Fits or natural disease to effect,” according to John Hale, minister in Beverly, in his book A Modest Enquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft (Boston, 1702). The girls screamed, threw things about the room, uttered strange sounds, crawled under furniture, and contorted themselves into peculiar positions. They complained of being pricked with pins or cut with knives, and when Reverend Samuel Parris would preach, the girls would cover their ears, as if dreading to hear the sermons. A doctor, historically assumed to be William Griggs, could find no physical evidence of any ailment. Others in the village began to exhibit the same symptoms.

In his book Memorable Providences Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions (1689) , Cotton Mather describes the strange behavior exhibited by the four children of a Boston mason, John Goodwin, and attributed it to witchcraft practiced upon them by an Irish washerwoman, Mary Glover. Mather, a minister of Boston’s North Church (not to be confused with the Episcopalian Old North Church of Paul Revere fame), was a prolific publisher of pamphlets and a firm believer in witchcraft. Three of the five judges appointed to the Court of Oyer and Terminer were friends of his and members of his congregation. He wrote to one of the judges, John Richards, supporting the prosecutions, but cautioning him of the dangers of relying on spectral evidence and advising the court on how to proceed. Mather was present at the execution of the Reverend George Burroughs for witchcraft on August 19, 1692, and intervened after the condemned man had successfully recited the Lord’s Prayer (supposedly a sign of innocence) to remind the crowd that the man had been convicted before a jury. Mather was asked by Governor Phipps in September to write about the trials, and obtained access to the official records of the Salem trials from his friend Stephen Sewall, clerk of the court, upon which his account of the affair, Wonders of the Invisible World, was based.

Traditionally, the affected girls are said to have been “entertained” by Parris’ slave woman Tituba, during the winter of 1692, although there is no contemporary evidence to support the story (Reis 56). Tituba’s race is also often cited as Carib-Indian or that she was of African descent, but contemporary sources describe her only as an “Indian.” Research by Elaine Breslaw has suggested that she may well have been captured in what is now Venezuela and brought to Barbados, and so may have been an Arawak Indian, but other slightly later descriptions of her, by Gov. Hutchinson writing his history of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the 18th century, describe her as a “Spanish Indian.” In that day, that typically meant an Indian from the Carolinas/Georgia/Florida. Contrary to the folklore, there is no evidence whatsoever to support the assertion that Tituba told any of the girls any stories about using magic. The one supportable association with any kind of magical practices is that John Indian, another slave in the Parris household and assumed to have been Tituba’s husband, was told a recipe for discovering the identity of a witch, a British recipe given to him by a neighbor of the parsonage.

The first three people accused were arrested for allegedly afflicting Betty Parris, Abigail Williams, 12-year-old Ann Putnam, Jr. and Elizabeth Hubbard were Sarah Good, Sarah Osburne and Tituba (Boyer 3). Tituba, as a slave of a different ethnicity than the Puritans, was an obvious target for accusations. Sarah Good, a poverty-worn, easily-angered woman, often muttered under her breath as she walked away from failed attempts of obtaining food and/or shelter from neighbors and people interpreted her muttering as curses. Sarah Osburne, an irritable old woman, was already marked for marrying her indentured servant. All of these women fit the description of the “usual suspects,” since nobody would likely stand up for them; neither Osburne nor Good attended church, which made them especially vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft.

These women were brought before the local magistrates on the complaint of witchcraft and interrogated for several days, starting on March 1, 1692, then sent to jail (Boyer 3). Other accusations followed in March: Martha Corey, Rebecca Nurse, and Rachel Clinton. Martha Corey, ever an outspoken woman, was skeptical about the credence of the girls from the start and scoffed at the hearings by the magistrates, unfortunately drawing attention to herself. Dorothy Good, the daughter of Sarah Good, was only 4 years old, and easily manipulated by the magistrates to say things that were taken as a confession, implicating her own mother. In order to be with her mother after the accusations, she claimed to herself be a witch, thereby she was arrested. The charges against Rebecca Nurse and Martha Corey greatly disturbed the community. Martha Corey was a full covenanted member of the Church in Salem Village, as was Rebecca Nurse in the Church in Salem Town. If such upstanding people could be accused of witchcraft and seen as possible witches, then anybody could be a witch and Church membership was no protection from accusation.

Throughout April, many more were arrested: Sarah Cloyce (Nurse’s sister), Elizabeth (Bassett) Proctor and her husband John Proctor, Giles Corey (Martha’s husband, and a covenanted church member in Salem Town), Abigail Hobbs, Bridget Bishop, Mary Warren (a servant in the Proctor household and sometime accuser herself), Deliverance Hobbs (step-mother of Abigail Hobbs), Sarah Wilds, William Hobbs (husband of Deliverance and father of Abigail), Nehemiah Abbott Jr., Mary Esty (sister of Cloyce and Nurse), Edward Bishop Jr. and his wife Sarah Bishop, and Mary English, and finally on April 30, the Reverend George Burroughs, Lydia Dustin, Susannah Martin, Dorcas Hoar, Sarah Morey and Philip English (Mary’s husband). Nehemiah Abbott Jr. was released because the accusers agreed he was not the person whose spectre had afflicted them. Mary Esty was released for a few days after her initial arrest because the accusers failed to confirm that it was she who had afflicted them, and then she was rearrested when the accusers reconsidered.

Much, but not all, of the evidence used against the accused was “spectral evidence,” or the testimony of the afflicted who claimed to see the apparition or the shape of the person who was allegedly afflicting them. The theological dispute that ensued about the use of this evidence centered on whether a person had to give their permission to the Devil for their “shape” to be used to afflict. Opponents claimed that the Devil was able to use anyone’s “shape” to afflict people, but the Court contended that the Devil could not use a person’s shape without their permission, therefore when the afflicted claimed to “see” the apparition of a specific person, that was accepted as evidence that the accused had been complicit with the Devil. Increase Mather and other ministers sent a letter to the Court, “The Return of Several Ministers Consulted,” urging the magistrates not to convict on spectral evidence alone. A copy of this letter was printed in Increase Mather’s ["Cases of Conscience"] published in 1693. Other evidence included the confession of the accused, the testimony of another confessing “witch” identifying others as witches, the discovery of “poppits,” books of palmistry and horoscopes, or pots of ointments in the possession or home of the accused, and the existence of so-called “witch’s teats” on the body of the accused.

As the number of accusations grew, the jail populations of Salem, Ipswich, Charlestown, Cambridge, and Boston swelled. The new governor and charter for the colony did not arrive until May. Some have postulated that without this, there was no legitimate form of government to try capital cases (Boyer 6), but this was not true. In the years between charters, according to the Records of the Court of Assistants, a group of thirteen pirates led by Thomas Johnson, a mariner of Boston, were tried and hanged on January 27, 1690 for acts of piracy and murder in August and October of 1689.Elizabeth Emerson of Haverhill, Massachusetts was tried and hanged for double-infanticide in May 1691.The fact that none of the witchcraft cases were tried until late May, after Governor Sir William Phips arrived and instituted a Court of Oyer and Terminer (to “hear and determine”), was likely in deference to his imminent arrival. Phips appointed William Stoughton, who had theological training but no legal training, as the Chief Justice of this court (Boyer 7). By then, Sarah Osborne had died of natural causes in jail on May 10 without a trial (Boyer 3), as had Sarah Good’s infant.

In May, warrants were issued for 36 more people: Sarah Dustin (daughter of Lydia Dustin), Ann Sears, Bethiah Carter Sr. and her daughter Bethiah Carter Jr., George Jacobs Sr. and his granddaughter Margaret Jacobs, John Willard, Alice Parker, Ann Pudeator, Abigail Soames, George Jacobs Jr. (son of George Jacobs Sr. and father of Margaret Jacobs), Daniel Andrew, Rebecca Jacobs (wife of George Jacobs Jr. and sister of Daniel Andrew), Sarah Buckley and her daughter Mary Witheridge, Elizabeth Colson, Elizabeth Hart, Thomas Farrar Sr., Roger Toothaker, Sarah Proctor (daughter of John and Elilzabeth Proctor), Sarah Bassett (sister-in-law of Elizabeth Proctor), Susannah Roots, Mary DeRich (another sister-in-law of Elizabeth Proctor), Sarah Pease, Elizabeth Cary, Martha Carrier, Elizabeth Fosdick, Wilmot Redd, Sarah Rice, Elizabeth How, Capt. John Alden (son of John Alden and Priscilla Mullins of Plymouth Colony), William Proctor (son of John and Elizabeth Proctor), John Flood, Mary Toothaker (wife of Roger Toothaker and sister of Martha Carrier) and her daughter Margaret Toothaker, and Arthur Abbott. John Willard and Elizabeth Colson managed to evade capture for a while but were finally taken into custody, whereas Daniel Andrew and George Jacobs Jr. were never apprehended. When the Court of Oyer and Terminer convened at the end of May, this brought the total number of people in custody for the court to handle to 62.

Curse of the Pharaohs

The Curse of the Pharaohs refers to the belief that any person who disturbs the mummy of an Ancient Egyptian pharaoh is placed under a curse whereby they will shortly die. Many tombs of pharaohs have curses written on or around them, warning against entering.

The belief was brought to many people’s attention due to the deaths of some members of the team of Howard Carter, who opened the tomb of Tutankhamun (KV62) in 1922, launching the modern era of Egyptology. The first of these “mysterious” deaths was that of Lord Carnarvon. He had been bitten by a mosquito, and later slashed the bite accidentally while shaving. It became infected and blood poisoning resulted. Skeptics pointed out that many, many others who visited the tomb or helped to discover it lived long and healthy lives. A study showed that of the 58 people who were present when the tomb and sarcophagus were opened, only eight died within a dozen years. All the others were still alive, including Howard Carter who died peacefully at the age of 64 in 1939. The doctor who did the autopsy on Tutankhamum lived until 75.

Some have speculated that deadly fungus could have grown in the enclosed tombs and been released when they were open to the air. Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, favoured this idea, and speculated that the mold had been placed deliberately to punish grave robbers. A newspaper report printed following Carnarvon’s death is also believed to have been responsible for the wording of the curse most frequently associated with Tutankhamun – “Death shall come on swift wings to him who disturbs the peace of the King” – a phrase which does not actually appear among the hieroglyphs in KV62.

While there is no evidence that such pathogens killed Lord Carnarvon, there is no doubt that dangerous materials can accumulate in old tombs. Recent studies of newly opened ancient Egyptian tombs that had not been exposed to modern contaminants found pathogenic bacteria of the Staphylococcus and Pseudomonas genera, and the moulds Aspergillus niger and Aspergillus flavus. Additionally, newly opened tombs often become roosts for bats, and bat guano may harbour histoplasmosis. However, at the concentrations typically found, these pathogens are generally only dangerous to persons with weakened immune systems. Air samples taken from inside an unopened sarcophagus through a drilled hole showed high levels of ammonia, formaldehyde and hydrogen sulfide; these gases are all toxic, but at dangerous concentrations are easily detected by their strong odours.

Partly as a result, many modern archaeologists wear protective clothing when opening long-closed burial chambers.

Banshee

Traditionally, when a citizen of an Irish village died, a woman would sing a lament (in Irish: caoineadh, ['ki¢°n??] or ['ki¢°n?u¢°]) at their funeral. These women singers are sometimes referred to as “keeners”. Legend has it that, for five great Gaelic families: the O’Gradys, the O’Neills, the O’Briens, the O’Connors, and the Kavanaghs, the lament would be sung by a fairy woman; having foresight, she would appear before the death and keen. When several banshees appeared at once, it indicated the death of someone great or holy. The tales sometimes recounted that the woman, though called a fairy, was a ghost, often of a specific murdered woman, or a woman who died in childbirth.

Banshees are frequently described as dressed in white or grey, and often having long, fair hair which they brush with a silver comb, a detail scholar Patricia Lysaght attributes to confusion with local mermaid myths. This comb detail is also related to the centuries-old traditional romantic Irish story that, if you ever see a comb lying on the ground in Ireland, you must never pick it up, or the banshees (or mermaids – stories vary), having placed it there to lure unsuspecting humans, will spirit such gullible humans away. Other stories portray banshees as dressed in green, red or black with a grey cloak.

Banshees are common in Irish and Scottish folk stories such as those recorded by Herminie T. Kavanagh. They enjoy the same mythical status in Ireland as fairies and leprechauns.

The banshee wails around a house if someone is about to die.

The Hag

A hag, or “the Old Hag”, was a nightmare spirit in British and Anglophone North American folklore. This variety of hag is essentially identical to the Anglo-Saxon mæra — a being with roots in ancient Germanic superstition, and closely related to the Scandinavian mara. According to folklore, the Old Hag sat on a sleeper’s chest and sent nightmares to him or her. When the subject awoke, he or she would be unable to breathe or even move for a short period of time. Currently this state is called sleep paralysis, but in the old belief the subject had been hagridden.It is still frequently discussed as if it were a para-normal state.

In Irish and Scottish mythology, the Cailleach is a hag goddess concerned with creation, harvest, the weather and sovereignty.In partnership with the goddess Brìde, she is a seasonal goddess, seen as ruling the winter months while Brìde rules the summer.In Scotland, a group of hags, known as The Cailleachan (The Storm Hags) are seen as personifications of the elemental powers of nature, especially in a destructive aspect. They are said to be particularly active in raising the windstorms of spring, during the period known as A Chailleach.

Hags as sovereignty figures abound in Irish mythology. The most common pattern is that the hag represents the barren land, who the hero of the tale must approach without fear, and come to love on her own terms. When the hero displays this courage, love, and acceptance of her hideous side, the sovereignty hag then reveals that she is also a young and beautiful goddess.

The Three Fates (particularly Atropos) are often depicted as hags.

In Persian folklore, the Bakhtak has the same role as that of “the Old Hag” in British folklore. The Bakhtak sits on a sleeper’s chest, awakening them and causing them to feel they are unable to breathe or even to move. Bakhtak also is used metaphorically to refer to “nightmare” in the modern Persian language.

Many stories about hags seem to have been used to frighten children into being good. Peg Powler, for example, was a river hag who lived in river trees and had skin the color of green pond scum. Parents told their children that if they got too close to the water she would pull them in with her extra long arms, drown them, and sometimes eat them. The parents hoped that the children would be afraid of the hag so they wouldn’t go anywhere near the water. That way, they’d never fall in and drown. Peg Powler has other regional names, such as Jenny Greenteeth from Yorkshire and Nellie Longarms from several English counties.

Many tales about hags do not describe them sufficiently to make it clear whether the tale deals with an old woman who has learned magic or a supernatural being.

Kraken

Although the name kraken never appears in the Norse sagas, there are similar sea monsters, the hafgufa and lyngbakr, both described in Örvar-Odds saga and the Norwegian text from c. 1250, Konungs skuggsjá. Carolus Linnaeus included kraken as cephalopods with the scientific name Microcosmus in the first edition of his Systema Naturae (1735), a taxonomic classification of living organisms, but excluded the animal in later editions. Kraken were also extensively described by Erik Pontoppidan, bishop of Bergen, in his “Natural History of Norway” (Copenhagen, 1752–3).

Early accounts, including Pontoppidan’s, describe the kraken as an animal “the size of a floating island” whose real danger for sailors was not the creature itself, but the whirlpool it created after quickly descending back into the ocean. However, Pontoppidan also described the destructive potential of the giant beast: “It is said that if it grabbed the largest warship, it could manage to pull it down to the bottom of the ocean” (Sjögren, 1980). Kraken were always distinct from sea serpents, also common in Scandinavian lore (Jörmungandr for instance).

According to Pontoppidan, Norwegian fishermen often took the risk of trying to fish over kraken, since the catch was so good. If a fisherman had an unusually good catch, they used to say to each other, “You must have fished on Kraken.” Pontoppidan also claimed that the monster was sometimes mistaken for an island, and that some maps that included islands that were only sometimes visible were actually indicating kraken. Pontoppidan also proposed that a young specimen of the monster once died and was washed ashore at Alstahaug (Bengt Sjögren, 1980).

Since the late 18th century, kraken have been depicted in a number of ways, primarily as large octopus-like creatures, and it has often been alleged that Pontoppidan’s kraken might have been based on sailors’ observations of the giant squid. In the earliest descriptions, however, the creatures were more crab- like than octopus-like, and generally possessed traits that are associated with large whales rather than with giant squid. Some traits of kraken resemble undersea volcanic activity occurring in the Iceland region, including bubbles of water; sudden, dangerous currents; and appearance of new islets.

In 1802, the French malacologist Pierre Dénys de Montfort recognized the existence of two kinds of giant octopus in Histoire Naturelle Générale et Particulière des Mollusques, an encyclopedic description of mollusks. Montfort claimed that the first type, the kraken octopus, had been described by Norwegian sailors and American whalers, as well as ancient writers such as Pliny the Elder. The much larger second type, the colossal octopus (depicted in the above image), was reported to have attacked a sailing vessel from Saint-Malo, off the coast of Angola.

Montfort later dared more sensational claims. He proposed that ten British warships that had mysteriously disappeared one night in 1782 must have been attacked and sunk by giant octopuses. Unfortunately for Montfort, the British knew what had happened to the ships, resulting in a disgraceful revelation for Montfort. Pierre Dénys de Montfort’s career never recovered and he died starving and poor in Paris around 1820 (Sjögren, 1980). In defence of Pierre Dénys de Montfort, it should be noted that many of his sources for the “kraken octopus” probably described the very real giant squid, proven to exist in 1857.

In 1830, possibly aware of Pierre Dénys de Montfort’s work, Alfred Tennyson published his popular poem “The Kraken” (essentially an irregular sonnet), which disseminated Kraken in English forever fixed with its superfluous the. Tennyson’s description apparently influenced Jules Verne’s imagined lair of the famous giant squid in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea from 1870. Verne also makes numerous references to Kraken, and Bishop Pontoppidan in the novel.

Bigfoot

Bigfoot, also known as Sasquatch, is an alleged apelike animal said to inhabit remote forests in North America, with many of the sightings occurring in the Pacific northwest of the United States and British Columbia, Canada. Bigfoot is sometimes described as a large, hairy bipedal hominoid, and many believe that this animal, or its close relatives, may be found around the world under different regional names, such as the Yeti of Tibet and Nepal. Bigfoot is one of the more famous examples of cryptozoology, a subject that tends to be dismissed as pseudoscience by mainstream researchers, because of unreliable eyewitness accounts and a lack of solid physical evidence. Most theorists consider the Bigfoot legend to be a combination of unsubstantiated folklore and hoaxes.