The Salem Witch Trials: Extreme Lack Of Scientific Evidence

Have you ever seen a government accuse a person of a crime he or she did not commit? Well, one of the best examples of this is in the town of Salem, Massachusetts. In this town in 1692, the courts not only wrongfully accused one person with sufficient evidence, but wrongfully accused 150 people of witchcraft. Furthermore, these people were accused without any scientific evidence. Even more terrible, though, is that 19 of these people were executed for this reason. The Salem Witch Trials sent many people to their graves without real scientific evidence because of the testimony of a group of young girls and the Puritan’s beliefs. One of the things that made the Salem Witch Trials so terrible, was the extreme lack of scientific evidence. The citizens of Salem were so scared of anything associated with the devil, that they turned to ‘spectral evidence’, to explain the cause of these young girls unexplainable fits (Forensics in History: The Salem Witch Trials 2013). But, as modern scientists research the condition of Salem Village at the time, they discovered that the summer of 1691 was, in the words of Linda Caporael, “warm, damp, and rainy”, the perfect conditions for the rye crops to be affected by ergot. Ergot is a fungus that causes some of the rye to be

Tituba is one of the first three women to be accused of witchcraft. But, she is the only one of them to survive the witch trials. Many historians think that Tituba introduced the “afflicted” girls to witchcraft. Her confession legitimized suspicions and led to investigations (Ray 2002). Meanwhile, John Proctor was actually around sixty years old at the time the Salem Witch Trials took place. Arthur Miller’s story, The Crucible, Proctor was said to be in his middle thirties. Abigail Williams was said to be seventeen years old during The Crucible. Another inaccurate thing in The Crucible was the affair between Abigail and Proctor (Ray