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When Ghosts Took the Witness Stand · Ebbs of History

• Ebbs 41 Podcast v1: Welcome back history lovers to The Ebbs of History, the show where we dig up the strangest, wildest, and creepiest true stories the past has to offer. From dancing plagues to pirate queens, you'll laugh, you'll gasp, and you'll love my impeccable dad jokes. But mostly, you'll learn that history is way cooler than your textbook ever told you. We are history-loving hosts, Zoe, Gavin, and I'm Jason. This is the Ebbs of History. Quick heads up before we start today. Today's story involves a real court putting real people to death. We're gonna keep it respectful and we're not going to dwell on it, but if that's not your thing today, come back and join us next week. Zoe, Gavin, I'd ask how everyone's week was, but it's been about fifteen minutes since we ended our last recording. So how was the last fifteen minutes? all right. It was pretty good. It was all right. We almost left for In and Out and then we decided we're gonna have it for dinner. That's right. So then I ate like a little snack and then we're back. So And we're recording this right after because I'm going to New York and Boston this week and we're not gonna have any time and next weekend and not gonna have any time to record and me edit. So we're doing it now. You're gonna have to share some history stuff you see on the way. yeah. Over there. I plan on stopping. I'm I'm driving from Albany to Boston at one point and I plan on stopping at Susan B. Anthony's house. the place where Herman Melville wrote Moby Dick. Wow Norman Rockwell's house. That's the one I really want to go to. He's like one of my favorite artists. I I really want to go see that. that one's still up in the air because of where it's at and the time that I'm gonna be in that area, so we'll see. But yeah, when we're when I'm in Boston, me and my boss are gonna probably do some historical Walking tour, so the bears are winning right now. Thirty one to seven last time I looked. All right, that's a good update for the past fifteen minutes. Thirty-one to seven. Thirty-one to seven. Go ahead. Dog bears. Dog bears. Okay. Today we're exploring the Salem witch trials. In sixteen ninety two, a Massachusetts village decided the devil had moved in down the road. Within ten months, over a hundred and fifty people were in chains. Twenty were dead and not one of them was a witch. Here's how a town talked itself into it. But before we start, Zoe, Gavin, what do you already know about the Salem witch trials? Okay. I know that ton of white men accused women of being witches. Okay. And I have a deck of cards. You have a deck of cards from Sam, 'cause mom and dad went there last year. Yeah. Okay. I was thinking, 'cause I can't even remember, but we didn't really talk about it in A Push. Like not that much. Which is kind of interesting. And you're past sixteen ninety two then. we are way past we're like the eighteen hundreds. Like we really didn't talk about it. Like it might have been like 'cause we have key IDs, but it might have like in like the parentheses of one. That's kind of just like an underlying, like define this as well. It wasn't Like we we didn't talk about it. It was kind of just like something that happened. Was it mentioned at all? I think it was it was a brief passage in the textbook. Okay. But it wasn't like a huge thing. You know, thinking about that, in the grand historical text, you know, context, it doesn't really matter much. It was like it was an isolated incident in Massachusetts Massachusetts, and it didn't really make anything happen. Mm-hmm. You know, in the end. And I think it's more of a contextual thing than a a a fact. Yeah. Not not not fact, but like something that you would study in history. Yeah. It's almost just more of like a how was the social environment in in the time period? Yes. How do you how do you contextualize how people treated women back then? Like if I was writing exactly if I was writing an L EQ about women in f Time Period One, I would talk about the Salem Witch trials and how they were prosecuted for that. Like I would use that as a bit of context for how like I would use that as an example, but it wouldn't be like the main topic of an essay thing. And then what about what do you know about how the twenty people died? Weren't they? Or were were put to death? Weren't they burned? Yeah, they were like burned at the stake. Okay. Yeah. 'Cause yeah, I think I think I'm not super like well versed on it. And you know, you'd think What city do you think it happened in? Boston. Salem. Salem. Salem. So it Well, you said Massachusetts. I think of Boston when you say Massachusetts. So So you already talked about school. What about in pop culture? It's definitely like dramatized, I feel. Yeah. Like knowing history and this podcast, they actually weren't burned at the stake. Interesting you say that, but go ahead. Go ahead. I just predicted it. Anyways. What I want to know is what you guys know already and where what you know comes from. There's like a lot of like Halloween movies, like hocus pocus kind of pocus, yeah. Yeah, that's probably a big one. Based off like the Salem witch child's command. Happens in Salem. It's you know filmed in Salem. yeah. All right. Yeah. All right. Picture the smallest town you've ever driven through. The one where the gas station is also the post office, but also the place where you buy worms. Now shrink it. Now take away the electricity, the doctors, the police, and anything resembling fun. That is Salem Village, Massachusetts, in the winter of 1692. Sounds like Cromwell. Like it's like no fun. Like at all. Which is weird because they were escaping Cromwell. They were escaping Cromwell, but they were also ex escaping no, wait a minute. They weren't escaping Cromwell. Or they w it was the Church of England. They were Puritans. Yeah. Trying to get away from the Church of England. That's right, yeah. They Puritans. So they were Cromwell. duh. my gosh. Wow. Puritan equal Cromwell. I just like completely forgot about that. And I do mean Salem village, not Salem town. They are two different places. Salem Village was the poor farming cousin inland, and it isn't even called Salem anymore. Today it's the town of Danvers. So every single tourist, me and mom included, who flies to Salem, Massachusetts to stand where the witch trial started, is standing in the wrong town. Danvers changed its name and tourists went to the wrong place anyway. What does a place actually gain by renaming itself after something terrible happens there? What does it lose? It's like would it lose? Well, what does it gain and what does it lose from renaming itself? It kinda loses that historical value, but also gains that like clean slate that like this tragedy happened. The clean slate, yep. That's a big gain. Cause I in In the Laramie project 10 years later, I have a monologue. Like I'm like the governor of Wyoming at the time. And I have a monologue where it's like, it happened here. The them the death of Matthew Shepherd happened here and we have to own it. And some people want to ignore it, but it but some people want to ignore it, but it happened here and we have to acknowledge that. That's awesome. I mean not awesome, but like no, that's right on point here. Yeah, that's why I'm like, wait, this is basically like my monologue. Yeah. Like the main main gist is like. People want to ignore it. People like are like, it didn't happen, or like it wasn't a hate crime, whatever, whatever. And then he's saying, like, well, it happened here and whatever it is, we have to embrace that. Cause it we can't just ignore it. Kind of the opposite of what Gavin said, like clean slate. Like he does like Yeah. He doesn't want that clean slate. No. He wants to keep that historical value to teach the new generation. Yeah. All right. I would say that It's a chance for people that live in that town to live normally. Mm-hmm. You know, when you think about it, they in the future, you know, say this happened in 1692. In nineteen hundred, the people had nothing to do with it and they can't live their lives normally. So I think changing their name helped gain normality for people that live there in the future. But what's lost Is that now Salem town reaps all that money from tourism and Danvers doesn't because Danvers changed his name. Yeah. You You know what would be a really good marketing thing? Go to the real Salem. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Leak as a tour. Salem Village had a brand new minister named Samuel Paris, and the village hated him. Genuinely hated. openly hated him. They argued about his salary, they argued about his firewood. At one point they simply stopped delivering the firewood in a Massachusetts winter, which is the seventeenth century version of turning off somebody's Wi-Fi. This is the mood of the town. Cold, broke, bored, and furious at each other. In January, Paris's nine year old daughter Betty And his eleven year old niece Abigail Williams started acting strange. They screamed, they threw things, they crawled under furniture, they twisted into positions the adults described as impossible. A doctor came, looked at them, found nothing physically wrong, and reached the only diagnosis available to a man with no idea what was going on. What do you think that diagnosis was? They're possessed. Yeah. Witchcraft. Or like insanity. Okay. Wait, and this is the minister's daughter? Minister's daughter and his niece. What? His niece. His brother or sister. So there was two? Two girls, yes. Two girls. The diagnosis the doctor gave was witchcraft. The doctor didn't say I don't know. He reached for the explanation his culture handed him. Now, why is I don't know so hard for an expert to say out loud? 'Cause it kinda like how how do I weight this? It's like on the tip of my tongue. They want it they want to act like they are the they know everything and having to say no is almost an ego crush. Ooh, that's good. It like kinda undermines their authority in a way. Like, yeah. Right. It it it costs them their authority. Yeah. You know? Yeah, that's exactly right. Like, it was on the tip of my tongue though. The authority is the whole job. Yeah. now, here's where it gets weird. And I mean weird even for this story. A neighbor named Mary Sibley decided to solve the mystery with baking. She had two enslaved people in the Paris household, Tichuba and John Indian, make a witchcake. The recipe was rye meal mixed with The afflicted girl's urine baked and then fed to a dog. The theory was that the dog would eat it and then somehow point out the witch. What? Like sniff them out like a bloodhound? Yeah. Hmm. I want to be clear that this was considered the sensible adult response. Everyone else was panicking. Mary Sibley was the one that said, Let's be scientific about this. Let's involve a dog and some pee. The dog, to nobody's surprise, didn't name any witches. But Reverend Paris found out and he was furious, because in his view Mary Sibley had just used magic to fight magic, which is exactly the kind of thing that invites the devil in. So now the village had proof that witchcraft was being practiced in Salem, their own proof that they made. Then the girls started naming names. The first three were the easiest targets in town Sarah Good, a homeless woman who begged door to door and muttered when people turned her away, Sarah Osbourne, an older woman who had scandalized everyone by marrying her indentured servant, and who hadn't been to church in years, and Tituba, an enslaved woman, most likely indigenous South American rather than African. Which is a detail that Hollywood has gotten wrong for about a century. Wait, so Sarah Good was homeless. Mm-hmm. Sarah Osbourne was an older woman who married her indentured servant. And then and hadn't been to church in a long time. Easy targets. Mm-hmm. Yeah, they're all down on their luck. Like Good and Osbourne denied everything. Tituba confessed. And this is the hinge of the entire disaster. Tituba did not just confess. She performed. She described a tall man in black who made her sign a book. She described a yellow bird, a red cat, a black dog, and a hog. She said there were nine names in that book, and she had only seen some of them. Nine names meaning there were more witches out there. Now, why do you think Tituba confessed to something she didn't do? The kicks and giggles. Okay. It was probably better than her life at the time. Okay. It was like if she confessed, she was smart enough to know that, like, hey, like, if I get caught doing it, if my consequence will be better than whatever I'm living right now. Okay. As an enslaved person, she had no legal standing, no one to vouch for her, and reportedly had been beat by Reverend Paris beforehand. Confessing bought survival for her. Denying brought a trial. She didn't just confess, she invented detail, which is a different act. That's someone reading the room and giving the audience the story that it wants. And here's the horrible logic. If you denied it, you went to trial and the court hanged you. If you confessed and named others, the court kept you alive because you were now a useful witness. Confess and live and deny and die. The court had built a machine that ran on lies and then acted surprised when it got fed lies. That exact trade is still on the table in American courtrooms right now. Plead guilty, take the deal, or go to trial and risk far worse. Now, is that a fair choice? No. Yeah no. Cause that kind of is like it forces you to do one thing. It f it it forces you to what? someone else wants. Okay. Because it's like, you'll get something better for yourself, but it's also like, but I do it. Right. So it's either you're fighting for you or you stay alive. Well, roughly ninety to ninety five percent of criminal convictions in the United States come from plea bargains, not trials. I think we just hear a lot more trials. So it's kind of like You do. So it it it feels like there's more trials even though there's not. Ninety to ninety five percent of And in plea deals and they don't go to trial. Courts would collapse without this system, but it gives defendants the certainty of knowing that, I'm only gonna go to jail for, you know, a year versus possibly going if I go to trial for twenty years. Yeah. And so it it unfortunately forces people that are actually innocent into going to prison for something they didn't do. Mm-hmm. But I feel like if you know you're innocent, why not go to trial? That's true, because it's the uncertainty. Mm-hmm. And also drowning in legal fees. Like it the the legal fees are gonna get you before it's up. Like either way, like it you're not served, it's not a good ending no matter which way. Yeah. So if you're an innocent person and you're facing twenty years if you go to trial or a certain two years, which one are you gonna take? Take the two years. Take the two, even though you didn't do it, because there's a possibility you could go for twenty. Mm-hmm. Yeah. If that's like even that's a real dilemma. It is a real dilemma. Like it's two years automatically or twenty years, but with the chance of getting zero. Yeah. Yeah. It's a it's yeah, and it's a fifty fifty chance. Even in civil court where I go. In trials, we always tell our clients because it's true, there's a fifty fifty chance. No matter how slam dunk your case is, we still tell our clients there's a fifty fifty chance you're gonna lose or win because you don't know what a jury's gonna do. Yeah, but I feel like if you have a sensible jury then Yeah, but you don't always you it's it's a gamble. It really is. It's and unfortunately like a lottery system. Yeah, and pick the jury. It's unfortunately how our justice system works. And if it didn't work this way, it would collapse because there's so many, you know, criminal convictions that happen. They can't all go through trials. Mm-hmm. You know? So anyway, back to our story. I just wanted to see how your guy where your guys heads were on the criminal tr criminal convictions and stuff. That whole area of the government in the like the world is just like so fascinating 'cause it's just like There's so many layers. I have like very strong feelings and yeah it's about prisons in general. And so many people have so many feelings about them. Cause like one of the reform things movements we could have done was prisons. And in my like group that presented, the person who did was like basically they moved from trying to rehabilitate people and put them back into society just to holding cells, just to hold people and do you know why do criminals. And this is it this is exactly why I have so strong feelings. Do you know why it's switched? It's probably was it money? Yeah. It's money because capitalism. Prisons have been privatized. They are now owned by companies and not run by the government. So they have incentive to keep people in there because they're getting money from the government to store these people. With masses. And that's what they're doing is storing people. Yeah. And they it's Pocket the money for themselves instead of putting the money into the prison. It is a for-profit corporation, the imprisonment of American people. I have very strong feelings on it. So I don't want to go into it too much. It's divisive because it is because it's everyone has such high opinions on it. One one side says, well, they need to be in jail. They've done wrong. And well, yeah, I I get that and I agree with it, but they also need to be rehabilitated. Mm-hmm. To be better people, but then you put in the money and it's like, they're just keeping them there. They're not they are not rehabilitating people. Period. In the eighteen hundreds it shifted because it used to be that it used to be like we would rehabilitate you. We would make sure you're good enough to enter society again. And now it's just the mass incarceration rates have gone up and up and up and up and up. Like And yeah, it may have switched that paradigm may have switched back then, but it really has become pronounced since the eighties. So and it is a very controversial p like topic. Crazy that it's been like that since for so long. Yeah. And it just finally boosted up in the eighties and the nineties. Like well, it's because it became corporate then. Yeah. That's why it boosted up. Mm-hmm. We were failing people then, you know, from the eighteen hundreds through to the nineteen eighties, but now in the nineteen eighties, we're pro they're profiting off of them. Not just not just, you know, tossing them aside from society. I just I I don't want to get into because I really do have very strong feelings. Okay, back to the story. By spring, it was out of control. Martha Corey was accused, and she was a church member in good standing, which meant nobody was safe. Rebecca Nurse was accused, a 71-year-old grandmother so respected that 39 neighbors signed a petition for her. The jury actually found her not guilty. The afflicted girls in the courtroom started howling. The judge asked the jury to reconsider the not guilty verdict, and the jury came back with guilty. And I'm gonna say that again. She was found innocent and then the court asked for a do-over. Isn't that unbelievable? Like that's it's crazy. They asked for a do-over when they didn't get the answer that they wanted. And then there was four-year-old Dorothy Good. Four? Four. I thought you'd have that reaction. That's why paused. Dorothy was Sarah Good's daughter. I just made that connection. I was just about to say. I was like, Yep. She was four. The examiners questioned her. She said something about a little snake that drank from her finger, and they took that as a confession. She was put in irons in a Boston jail. She was there for roughly eight months. Her mother was hanged while she sat in that cell. Her baby sister died in jail. Dorothy came out and by her father's account years later was never the same person again. That's that that's terrible. Isn't it? That that's terrible. Was was she in the same jail as like older women too? Or was it like separated by age? Nope. All in the same jail. It was all in one building. And they actually spelled it G A O L. my gosh. Mm-hmm. my gosh. That's in my that's in the that's in my script, the thirty nine step script. I thought it was just a mist. I thought it was just No, that's how they spelled Joe. my gosh. I thought I thought that was just like a typo. What? No. That just it just clicked. It all just clicked. The court that handled all this was called the court of Oyer and Terminer, which sounds like a law firm, but it's just an old French for to hear and to determine. Its biggest problem was spectral evidence. Spectral evidence meant a witness could stand up in court and say her ghost pinched me last Tuesday. And no one else had to see it. No one else could check that fact. The ghost wasn't available for cross examination. So, all that in mind, let's build a defense. You're accused of something that by definition leaves no trace, and that only your accuser can perceive. What's your move? How do you defend yourself? All right, so I'm gonna take your guys' silence as I have no idea. Because because and I agree with you, even though you didn't say anything, because it's a trap. Yes, that's it. Like you trapped in a corner. Every defense confirms the charge. So there is no defense. Denial proves the devil is strong in you. Mm-hmm. Calm proves that you're cold. Distress proves guilt. Character witnesses just mean that you fooled people. The technical word unfalsifiable. Like last episode. Like episode. It's a good thing. It's a bad thing. So I'm gonna give you some modern parallels too to this. Not just, you know, back then from the Salem Wish trials. conspiracy theories where debunking evidence counts as part of the cover up. If you're not with us, you're against us. Mm-hmm. Right? It's the us versus them mentality. That's right. That's politics. Black it's only black and white, there's no gray. That's right. That. Online accusations where asking for evidence is framed as defending the accused. That's a deep deeper one. Yeah, I'm like Just think about it. what does this go to from last episode? About lack of evidence? absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence. That's right. That's where this comes in. This is little bit more, you know, easier to wrap your head around on. You know, this may be like a really small connection but like playing a game like Among Us like a murder mystery game, someone accuses you or like someone else and you say, Where's your evidence? Then like you're kinda like a a like a accomplice, you know? Like you also the imposter. yes. Like you're defending the accused. So now the accusy. That's a very interesting parallel. I like how you brought it to what you do. You know, but there's also a flip side to this. some real harms genuinely leave no physical trace. And demanding proof can silence the victims. Okay. So The question underneath is how a system takes an unverifiable claim seriously without letting it become unanswerable. It's another tough topic, another tough you know, idea to to contextualize. Salem's answer eventually was to stop admitting the claim at all. So can you think of anything that genuinely leaves no physical trace that is not spectral? You know, like it a person was harmed by something, genuinely harmed by something, but it left no physical trace. Like cyberbullying and and like like mental like bullying, you know? Yes, one hundred percent. Online with cyberbullying, you can have a completely different like identity pretty much. Like no who has their like full government name as they use a name online. Yeah, no one's Like people have it as some like Like hashtag hashtag like cool guy number twelve twenty nineteen, you know? The only problem with what you're saying though is that it can like it's not a physical it can be traced. It's not physical on you, but there's you know, you can trace that. But I do like where your head is going on that one. But it does leave t lead to like depression and like mental harms. It leads to other things, but like the actual act of it isn't actually doing anything, but it's what the recipient Takes from it. Okay. Going back to the defenses, I said it's a trap. You know, if you deny, it proves the devil's strong in you and all that kind of stuff. You can't win that argument. And that's the point. And the court knew it was sketchy, which is why they leaned so hard on confessions. On June 10th, Bridget Bishop was hanged. She was the first. She was a woman who wore a red bodice, ran a tavern, and argued with her husbands in public. Which in Salem was roughly equivalent to a criminal record. July nineteenth, five more, including Rebecca Nurse and Sarah Good, were all hanged. On the latter, Reverend Nicholas Noyce told Sarah Good to confess, saying she was a witch and that she knew it. Noyce. Sarah Good looked at him and said, I am no more a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take away my life, God will give you blood to drink. Twenty-five years later, Nicholas Noyce died of internal hemorrhaging, choking on his own blood. Now Yeah. Now is that a curse coming true? Or is it that a story people told each other for twenty-five years until they ri until reality caught up? I know which one's more fun. I also know which one is more likely. Going off last week's episode, if you listen to it, mm-hmm. it my I made up a point. It was the less interesting argument is normally true. Yeah. So I think the second option but it could also just be a coincidence. It could be a coincidence. I don't think it's a real curse. It's not like it's it's not like hemorrhaging is something that's rare. It's a Yeah, it it's common, especially in a time like 1692. Right. August nineteenth. That's my birthday. Yes, it is. Five more were hanged, including f a former minister named George Burroughs. And Burroughs did something at the gallows that nearly broke the holding open. The common belief was that a witch couldn't recite the Lord's Prayer without stumbling. Burroughs stood there and recited it perfectly, start to finish. Not one mistake. The crowd started to turn. People were shouting to stop it. Cotton Mather, one of the most famous ministers in New England, was there on horseback. He called out that the devil can appear as an angel of light, that a man could be a wizard and still say the words. The crowd settled down. The execution went ahead. One good speech held the whole thing together for another month. Go on. So I did a presentation on this back in sixth grade. Like kangaroo court. This is kangaroo court. I've heard I'd I never watched it, but there's this like one bluey episode where they put the dad on trial for fighting. I never watched it, but I've heard of it. And like that's like a kangaroo court. But it's like There's no escaping, you know? Like they're trapped in a corner. Yeah. There's always an excuse. cotton. Why do you think Cotton Mather, by saying what he said, calmed everybody down and allowed the hanging to go on? No knowing who Cotton Mather is as, you know, one of the most famous ministers in all of New England. Because like it calmed everyone down. Yeah. Because But why? Because he has to Because he had High power. He had authority. Yep. Back to the authority and the and the doctors losing authority. Yeah we talked about earlier. All right. September nineteenth belongs to Giles Corey, an eighty-year-old farmer with the stubbornness of a mountain. Giles refused to enter a plea. Not guilty, not innocent, nothing. Under English law, no plea meant no trial, and no trial. Meant the state couldn't seize his property. It also meant that the court could use an old punishment called penforte et dure, which meant piling stones on a man's chest until he either spoke or stopped. And so for two days they added weight. The sheriff kept asking him to plead. And Giles Quarry's only answer was more weight. That was it. That was all he said. He's the only person in American history killed that way. And he did it so that his son-in-laws would inherit his farm instead of the court taking it. And it worked. Three days later, on september twenty second, eight more people were hanged, including Giles' wife Martha. That was the last group. Nobody knew it at the time, but the machine had just run out of road. Why? A few reasons all landing at once. The accusations had spread from powerless outsiders to prominent people, and once the accusations reached important families, important families stopped finding it entertaining. There's a persistent story more legend than proof that the governor's own wife was named. Increase Mather, Cotton's father, awesome name, by the way, and the president of Harvard, Wrote a document arguing against spectral evidence with a line worth memorizing. It were better that ten suspected witches should escape than that one innocent person should be condemned. Interestingly, three hundred and thirty-four years ago today, Governor William Phipps dissolved the court of Oyer and Terminer on October twenty ninth, sixteen ninety-two. He just shut it down. A new court convened in January, this time with spectral evidence thrown out, and suddenly almost everybody was found not guilty. Same accusers, same accusations, different rules. Fifty two people were tried, three were convicted, and all were reprieved. Turns out that the devil had a lot of trouble with evidentiary standards. The final count is twenty dead by execution, nineteen by hanging and Giles Quarry by stones, at least five more died in jail, including Sarah Osborne and Sarah Good's infant daughter. Side note, the spot where the jail was is now an apartment building. I don't know if I could live in there knowing that an infant child had died while shackled in Yeah, no. Totally worried about being haunted. Yeah. But isn't that crazy? Like the the exact spot mom and I walked by it, the exact spot where the jail was is now just a new nice apartment building. You know, and I I just want to bring up when we went to England and we went to High Clare Castle, Lady Carnavin was walking with us or you know when she was talking about Americans and how Americans just knock things down and build new things whereas in England they res they preserve their history and there's, you know, all kinds of old buildings and stuff. This is a prime example of that. Yeah. Yeah. That's so true. We care more about profit than history. Yeah, absolutely. They just tore down this jail and it's a historic, you know, bad things happen there. I get it, but Yeah. That's almost with the you want to erase you don't want to keep what's happened in the town like you want to erase 'cause it's that's Terrible. Yeah. Like you don't want that to be part of the air. So it's like you want sorry. It's almost like an out of sight, out of mind thing. It's like if I don't see it, it didn't happen. You wanna evase the bad to make more profit. Yeah. The evase the tragedy. More than 150 people were accused, some as far away as Andover, which actually had more accused people than Salem Village did. And here's the part that makes me put my head in my hands. Nobody was burned. I knew it. Not one. Burning at the stake was a European thing. Every book cover, every Halloween decoration, every cartoon you've ever seen has this wrong. Yeah. That's interesting. And we we both said it too. Like we both are like, yeah, they got burned, obviously. Right, exactly. What's another example of this where You think historically this is how it was, but it actually it never was. I have one. I have one. Go for it. hailed getting shot in the eye by an arrow. Ding ding ding. That's one for sure. There you go. Anything else, Zoe? th there's probably so many. there are, yeah. It's like the Mandela effect. It's like you just you think something happened this. But honestly, any case of the Mandela effect, like I would just put like I I know it's very general, very broad, but how about Vikings with horned helmets? Yeah. Napoleon being short. He wasn't short. Yeah. That's that was all propaganda. It was propaganda from England. That's exactly what it was. Einstein failing math. He didn't fail math. Really? Nope. Huh. He probably just had like ADHD. He just didn't f wasn't able to focus. They just didn't He didn't fail math. That that's that's all it is. But people say he failed math, but yet he became this, you know math mat mathematician genius. So people were burned in England but not in America? I don't know about England, but in Europe for sure. In Germany, I know 100% Germany. I know in England they did a lot of drowning. They they had the witch chair that they would dunk into Memory of Canterbury. We could see it. It was still there. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. I'm actually so upset we couldn't see the knave of Canterbury Cathedral. I know. yeah. Cause we're learning about church parts in art history. And I'm just like nave, Apsy to land. Like I've like, I've been there in certain churches. Like you know, in the cathedrals, I was like way more interested in like the architecture of it and like the stained glass. my god. It's beautiful and it's historical, you know? And you walk in and you look up and it's just no camera can can grasp the feeling of looking up in a cathedral like that. It's it's grand and it is the exact word to use. Yeah. The thing is is I didn't realize when I started taking art history that there's gonna be so much architecture. Yeah. But there's so much architecture. Like like it's like what we're doing right now, there's more architecture than actual like paintings and stuff. Like it's like we have to have no so many different architectural terms for like the Parthenon and the Pantheon and all its churches, like Haja Sophia, like that kind of stuff. Like or just so much and it's it's all the same, like idea with like a knave and aposetal end it has all the stuff it's just like applied to different styles absolutely stuff you know when thinking of stuff like this like we went over this last year I don't really remember this specific term but it's like like trial by like stupid means you know like in Monty Python's Holy Grail they like accuse someone of like d like doing witchery and they do something as like something like a balance. I forgot. But it's like stupid trials like that that like like they think here's one. throwing someone into like a viver and if they float right they're yeah innocent if they sink they're like a witch. Are you thinking about trial by ordeal? Yes, that's it. Trial by ordeal. Okay. AKA stupid means. Yeah. I like that. Yeah. I think I like stupid means better. Me too. No, it's yeah, yeah. Yeah, trial by ordeal. Yeah, I absolutely if you sink, you're you're you're not a witch, but you're also dead. Yeah. If you float, you're a witch. Like that just makes no sense. Either way, you're dead either way. That's that's the dunking chair in Canterbury that we see that we saw. It it's Just stupid. There's no logic behind it. No. Slowly over time, Salem did something almost no group of people ever does. It admitted that it was wrong. What? In 1697, five years later, Massachusetts held a day of fasting and repentance. Judge Samuel Sewell, one of the men who signed the death warrants, stood up in his church in Boston while the minister read his apology aloud. And Sewell stood there the entire time so everyone could see exactly who was sorry. He kept the date as a private day of repentance for the rest of his life. He also went on to write the first anti slavery pamphlet published in the colonies. In 1706, Anne Putnam Junior, one of the accusing girls, stood in the Salem Village Church and apologized publicly. She had been twelve at the time, And she said that she had been deluded by Satan and asked forgiveness from the families of people who she helped kill, particularly Rebecca Nurse. I I I find that one a little bit disingenuous because she wasn't actually like, yeah, she was sorry, but she wasn't taking sh sh she blamed the devil. Yeah. Right? So it's like, you know, she blames Satan. Are yeah, I get that you're sorry, but are you remorseful on that? Like, sorry, yeah, the the devil made me do it. No. That's just an excuse. It's an excuse, exactly. In seventeen eleven, the colony started paying compensation to the f families. In nineteen fifty-seven, Massachusetts formally apologized, though it only named a few people. In two thousand one, the governor signed a bill clearing five more. And then in twenty twenty two An eighth grade civics class in North Andover noticed that one woman had been left off every single list. Elizabeth Johnson Jr. Convicted, never executed, never pardoned, never cleared for three hundred and twenty-nine years. Because she had never had descendants to fight for her. Those kids researched it, wrote it up, and got their state senator to attach it to a budget bill. It passed. Elizabeth Johnson Jr. was cleared in twenty twenty two by a group of thirteen year olds in a civics class. That's so cool. Isn't that cool? Gavin, come on, get to it. Yeah, right. What are you doing in eighth grade? Watching Hamilton. Elizabeth Johnson was missed for three hundred and twenty nine years for one reason. Nobody was left who was related to her. And this is the most hopeful ending that I think I could have written and and read out loud. Because, you know, even after three hundred and twenty nine years, she was finally exonerated because of some kids. And I absolutely love that story. This puts a smile on my face, like hope. Yeah. Historiography. Historians have argued about sixteen ninety two for three hundred years, and the theories tell you as much about the historians as about Salem itself. In nineteen seventy six, a researcher named Linda Caporial proposed Ergot poisoning. A fungus on rye bread that causes convulsions and hallucinations. Does ergot poisoning sound familiar? It sounds like the cake. No. Cause there's like the okay. Cause it 'cause it's rye. It causes Well, I guess so, yeah, there's there's the rye connection. Convulsions and hallucinations. And hallucinations. Convulsions like and hallucinations. acid. It's it sounds like the the daughter and the niece what they were Acting like yeah. A little bit, yeah. But that was what she was saying that made him do that. I'm talk I'm thinking bigger from a prior episode of this. Ergot poisoning causing convulsions. is this like kind of was it dancing plague. The dancing plague. There we go. It's a tidy story and it caught on fast, this ergot poisoning. It had also been picked apart hardcore. The symptoms don't match well, and Ergot doesn't explain why the fit stopped exactly when the legal rules changed, right? Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum's Salem Possessed argue that it was a land feud wearing a costume. The poor western farming families against the prosperous eastern merchant side of the village, with the Putnams and the Porters at the center. Mary Beth Norton's In the Devil's Snare made a different case. New England was losing a brutal frontier war with the Wabanaki. Refugee children from Maine were living in these households, and the devil people saw in the woods looked a lot like the enemy that they couldn't defeat. The honest answer is probably all of it. Fear, land, war, gender, money, and a court that accepted ghosts as witnesses. Lessons we've learned today. Anything that we can learn from today, kids. double check your sources. Mm-hmm. Because kinda it's the same thing with this with the spectral evidence, like it's kind of that kind of idea where it's like one person says something but there's no way to prove wrong. No way to prove them. If you try and defend it, you're you're touched by the devil. Yeah. Mm hmm. Anything, Evan? Gabba's normally more eloquent with describing lessons than me, so He is. It's your it's your superpower. It is. I I g I guess I could just like articulate it better, but I don't know. I'm just gonna say people are stupid, which kinda contradicts what you just said. like religion is like strong, you know? I like at least back then, religion had power over over thought. Okay. You know? Yeah. Your beliefs. Mm-hmm. I've got a couple. the rules of evidence are not just boring paperwork. They're the only things standing between you and your neighbor's bad dream. Salem did not end because people stopped believing in witches. Salem ended because a court stopped accepting spectral evidence. Same beliefs, better rules, almost nobody convicted. And second, watch who gets accused first. It was a beggar, an outcast, and an enslaved woman. It always starts with whoever nobody will defend, and it never stops there. People target the weak. People target the weak. And where are we right now in our country? Who are we targeting right now? The the weak. The immigrants. Yes. It's exactly the same story. Three hundred and whatever years later. It never ends. And Finally, apologizing is a real historical act. Samuel Sewell standing in church, Anne Putnam standing in front of the families, and an eighth grade class finishing the job in twenty twenty two. Being wrong is human. Saying it out loud though is very rare. It's time for the fun fact challenge. let's do this. It's the whole reason we take notes. Alright, we're back to using Mosif's buzzers today, so I'll be able to see a number when the when these two lock in. Remember, both of you lock in when you ha when you have your answer. Here we go. Question one. Which minister argued that it was better for ten suspected witches to escape than for one innocent person to be condemned? Never know his name. Me neither. Do you want a hint? Yeah. I zoomed Gavin. Reverend Seabold? No. Incorrect. Can I get a hint? Zoe, go ahead. Hint, please. No, I'm not gonna give a hint until you give an answer. Whether it's right or wrong. Okay. Reverend Samuel Paris. Samuel Paris. Incorrect. I know, yeah. Here's your hints. Ready to buzz in again? Mr. Pope man. He was the father of Cotton Mather. Gavin. no. you like like it was like a clever name he said. I remember. Alright, I'm gonna have to call it for Zoe now. Give her an a chance to answer. Reverend Mather. While technically correct, it is not what I want. Then I don't know. Is it like innocence? You're close, it starts with an I. I know for no points anymore, guys. okay. Starts with an I. Incredible. It starts with an IN. In INC. Inceivable. Incredible. Incredi. Increase. Increase. Increase mather. Increase matter. Alright, so the point goes to no one, which means I might have to come up with a time. I don't think you will. All right. Next question. What fungus did Linda Coporeal propose as the cause of the girl's symptoms? We just talked about I don't write down historiography. Me neither. Not Ugh Can I guess? What was that? Zoe. E. coli. Incorrect. I know it starts with the E. It's E T H S Go. Ethwa. Incorrect. Ergot. Ergot. Ergot. Ergot. Bro, we're not doing very good on this one. my god. So now you don't need a tiebreaker. This is true. This is the tiebreaker. This is the tiebreaker. Here we go. This is terrifying. Which woman finally had her conviction co Zoe. Elizabeth Johnson Jr. That is correct. Good job. I was like, is this gonna be the first one we have zero points earned? This is gonna be crazy. This day in history. Today is October twenty ninth. And on this date in sixteen ninety two, do you guys remember? the court shut down I couldn't finish the sentence. Oyer and Terminor. Yeah. Governor William Phipps dissolved the court of Oyer and Terminor, ending the Salem witch trials. The replacement court banned spectral evidence, and the same accusations that had produced executions suddenly produced almost nothing but acquittals. October twenty-ninth, eighteen sixty-three. A conference in Geneva closed with the resolutions that created the International Committee of the Red Cross. Built on the idea that wounded soldiers should be treated as patients rather than enemies, no matter which side they fought for. I like that one. Me too is a good one. See now it's a war crime if you shoot a medic and hearing that. Yeah. Yeah. And hearing that probably also patients. Yeah. And this is where it started. Mm-hmm. It's a it it's really interesting if from like a like a battlefield perspective. Like it's just like yeah, it's it's very interesting. It's I think what you're trying to reach for here is that there is some civility in war. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's a good one. That's why it's like kind of more like wholesome. Yeah. Like not like a like even in like a war setting and like tragedy, there's still light and like at the end of the tunnel. There's still some hope even in Something so barbaric. Yeah. All right. So for this next one, I have to go back because a couple of weeks ago we talked about Black Friday, remember? Yeah. Yeah. And I said that I always think of the stock market crashing on Black Friday. All right. Well, on this date in October on October twenty ninth, nineteen twenty nine, it was Black Tuesday, actually. So I was completely wrong about Black Friday. Wow. Black Tuesday, roughly sixteen million shares were dumped on the New York Stock Exchange in a single day, wiping out fortunes and marking the loudest moment of the crash that opened the Great Depression. So it was a Black Tuesday, not Black Friday. I had it wrong my entire life. Wow. What did you say it was? Black Friday. And I think it's because of Black Friday with sales and stuff. Yeah. It just rolls off the tongue more than Black Tuesday. And I want this to be a lesson to you guys that What you think isn't always correct. Isn't always correct, and it's okay to say that you're wrong. Okay. What? It's okay to say you're wrong. It's a very important life lesson. Foreign topic. Very important. Some people cannot admit that they are wrong. Yep. We're all looking at you right now, Gavin. I hope No one's looking at it. I'm not looking at anybody. And then the last one today on this day in 1969, a student at UCLA sent the first message over ARPANET, the ancestor of the internet. He tried to type login, the system crashed after two letters, and the internet's first word was L O L O. Ugh. That's actually really interesting. That's cool Yeah. It's cool. All right, so that's Salem. A cold, angry village, two sick kids, a dog that ate the world's worst cake, a court that accepted ghosts as witnesses, and twenty people dead for nothing. It ended not with a hero, but with a rule change. And it got finished three centuries later by middle school children. That's it for this episode. Thanks for traveling your time with us. If you like today's story, share it with a friend, a teacher, or your family. Then come find us on Instagram at Ebbs of History with your show ideas, corrections, and questions. Signing off, this is your co-host Gavin Zoe. And me, Jason. Until next time, keep wondering, keep laughing, and keep learning through the ebbs of history.