The Salem Witch Trials Witchcraft has been around since biblical times. Belief in the supernatural, especially the work of the devil, who was giving witches the power to harm others, emerged as a huge problem in Europe in the fourteenth century. Salem, Massachusetts is just one of the many places that has been hindered by witchcraft. This eventually transcended into what has become known as the Salem Witch Trials. In the early 1690s, a group of girls gathered in a house around a bowl in Salem, Massachusetts. Among the girls was the daughter of the house, nine-year old Elizabeth (Betty) Parris, whose father was a Puritan minister, and her eleven-year old cousin Abigail. The rest of the girls worked as servants in the village of Salem. …show more content…
After a local doctor, William Griggs diagnosed Abigail and Elizabeth with witchcraft, because nothing else could be explained, many other young girls began to experience similar symptoms. Like many cultures had done before, colonists would attribute anything they could not explain to supernatural phenomena, especially malevolent or beneficent forces. To the colonists witchcraft was a real and serious threat. They believed witches could control people's thoughts and actions, and force them to behave in evil ways. Any old women, usually childless and living alone, fit the profile of a European witch. These witches were thought to fly through the air on broomsticks, and cause any number of horrible things to happen; including, crop failure, birth defects, or a child's death. Witches and their evil intent and activities explained what was unexplainable. Seeing that “witchery” was all around the community, people had devised ways to see whether or not someone was guilty of working with the devil. The courts would bake a witch cake, filled with a person's urine, the women is thought to have condemned, and feed it to a dog, if the women is in pain and starts to cry, she is definitely a witch. Another way they tried to see if people were actually witches or not was to have them recite the lord's prayer, and say their ten commandments, if they do