The Salem Witch Trials were a succession of court proceedings relating to witchcraft following the unexplainable behavior of a certain number of girls in the village of Salem. The trials lasted a little over a year starting in the second month of the annum 1692. The Salem Witch Trials took their root from a family in Boston which had a few of their children suffer from convulsions that couldn’t medically be explained by the local doctors at the time. A book about the Goodwin family’s children was written in 1688 which related the convulsions to witchery and then three years later the family of Samuel Parris, who was a reverend at the church of Salem who had moved there from Boston, came under discrimination from the town to leave.
The whole Salem Witch Trials started when the reverends’ daughter Elizabeth and the reverends’ niece Abigail started going through fits of the same nature that the Goodwin children had gone through roughly three decades ago. Elizabeth and Abigail were forced by the townspeople, who had now begun to believe that the fits were a product of witchery, to tell them who was putting spell on them. The girls gave the name of Tituba feeling like they needed to give someone’s name to get the pressure off their backs. Later Sarah Osborne and Sarah Goods were also named as associates of Tituba in putting spells on girls around the village.
The hearings took place in the counties of Middlesex, Suffolk and Essex in the colonial state of Massachusetts and involved the arresting of as many as a hundred and fifty people.
Salem Witch Trials
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