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Salem Witch Trials Essay

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Preceding the horrific events of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692, the village of Salem was experiencing many difficulties, and in spite of its name, it was hardly a haven of tranquility.(Marvel, 2002, p.14) The town faced varying problems ranging from factional politics, religious problems, and famine. The winter of 1691 leading up to the summer of 1692 brought a time of suspicion, accusations, and mass hysteria. Many accusers, who were often little girls, went through alarming physical symptoms, such as inability to consume and sleep, erratic behavior, seizures, and panic attacks. (Kinchlow, 2011)

The girls often identified their inflictors mainly as women whose positions in the society made them particularly vulnerable to accusation of witchcraft. …show more content…

Caporael in 1976 proposed that the girls convulsions and hallucinations may have resulted from ergot poisoning. This theory is supported by the several key factors, such as ergot being a popular fungus that grew on grains which is geographically near the location of the “inflicted young girls”. The poisoning may have caused the girl’s initial physical symptoms, but their behavior afterwards is left mysterious. The evil deeds done by specters, which were brought upon by witches, could only be seen by accusers, so spectral evidence was hard to prove accurate or inaccurate. The Magistrate, however, instead of investigating this case, corroborated the evidence with empirical evidence to support it.(Real History Behind The Salem Witch Trials, 2011, 2:30) The utmost contradicting piece of evidence became confession, which became the strongest and most acceptable form of evidence. Those who confessed were thought as mistaken people trying to return back to God, but the Historian Professor of Harvard, David D. Hall, states that confessing witches had a logical reasoning and psychological reasoning of confessing, and were not trying to redeem themselves in the eyes of God.Some witches had absorbed the message that they had sinned, so they confessed, others had reasoned if they “confessed” they could escape with their

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N) also brings up the possibility of a fungus called ergot triggering the hysteria of 1692. Ergot grows on cereal grains and can be poisonous which was a “common condition resulting from eating contaminated rye bread” back in the seventeen hundred´s. Ergot is believed to have affected the accusers by causing symptoms such as “crawling sensations, tingling in the fingers, vertigo and hallucinations”. To better understand how ergot played a role in the Salem witch hysteria, an additional document listing how much rye and other cereal grains were consumed during the year 1692 would help determine a

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The accused would be hanged or killed in another means if they were chosen by the girls to be the witch. The girls who chose the witch were major players in the trials. The doctor that declared it to be the cause of witches was also a major

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The first ones to be affected by witchcraft were Betty, who was 9, and Abigail, who was 11: both showed symptoms of ergot poisoning, and both fit in the age group (Pruitt). It is the same for the other girls; they all have symptoms related to ergot poisoning, and they are all in the same age group. Their guardian Parris was the minister of the town and they took the word of God seriously(Weller 1:05) so they had no reason to fake it because that would go against God, making them sin which was a really bad thing to them. Why would they do something that they knew would go against their faith by choice making it worse, unless it was

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The Salem Witch Trials; Madness or Logic In Stacey Schiff’s, List of 5 Possible Causes of the Salem Witch Trials and Shah Faiza’s, THE WITCHES OF SALEM; Diabolical doings in a Puritan village, discuss in their articles what has been debated by so many historians for years, the causes of the Salem Witch trials. Schiff and the Faiza, purpose is to argue the possible religious, scientific, communal, and sociological reasons on why the trials occurred. All while making word by word in the writer’s testimony as if they were there through emotion and just stating simply the facts and theories. They adopt the hectic tone in order to convey to the readers the significance, tragedy, logic, loss, and possible madness behind these life changing events,

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