They got away with murder in Salem Village

Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
October 15, 2024

They got away with murder in Salem Village just by saying they believed someone was a witch!

The accusers were responsible for the murder of 19 people found guilty of witchcraft and one crushed to death without a trial. Reading the list of those who accused innocent people may make you wonder if any of them were put on trial. The answer is no because there was no way to prove what they claimed to believe were nothing more than lies from their lips. Imagine the trauma inflicted on the colony of Massachusetts because the accused came from all over it. 

The accusations ran their course in Salem Village but not in Andover, where 48 were accused compared with 23 in Salem Village, says Burns. “A lot of people were against spectral evidence, so confessions were now the gold standard to find people guilty. The confessions that came before were from people with no agency whatsoever, like little Dorothy. But when they got to Andover, the magistrates were really good at interrogating people in private. By September, they could coerce people like clockwork. There, a lot who confessed were children as young as six.” National Endowment For The Humanities

There were many reasons for what happened there and what was behind it.

Evidence points to several factors that may have contributed to the mass hysteria: “An influx of refugees from King William’s War with French colonists, a recent smallpox epidemic, the threat of attack from Native Americans, a growing rivalry with the neighboring seaport of Salem Town, and the simmering tensions between leading families in the community created the perfect storm of suspicion and resentment.” Many historians believe the “witches” were also victims of scapegoating, personal vendettas, and social mores against outspoken, strong women.

But it didn't just happen in the colony of Massachusetts. The following is from New England Law.

The Salem Witch Trials occurred just as Europe’s “witchcraft craze’’ from the 14th to 17th centuries was winding down, where an estimated tens of thousands of European witches, mostly women, were executed.

The Puritans believed physical realities had spiritual causes. For example, if the crops failed, the Devil may have played a role. With this worldview, it was not a stretch for them to accept 'spectral evidence' of spirits and visions—which was the primary evidence used as proof of guilt during the Salem Witch Trials.

The thought of bad things happening as acts of God goes back to Biblical times. If people suffered, it was God judging them. If they prospered, then it was God's reward. This begs the question, if God was doing it to them, then how did they place blame on the Devil and witchcraft? How did they come full circle and again set their miseries on God and not the Devil? When the trials were over, they had a "Day of Atonement" to ask God to forgive them; that is precisely what they were led to believe instead of continuing to blame witches and the devil.

Whatever reason the accusers needed, it was provided. The list included torture, which made them very good at getting accusations "in private."

Aftermath of the Salem Trials
After the prisoners awaiting trial on charges of practicing witchcraft were granted amnesty (pardoned) in 1693, the accusers and judges showed hardly any remorse for executing twenty people and causing others to languish in jails. Instead, they placed the blame on the "trickery of Satan," thus freeing themselves from any sense of guilt. Jurors and townspeople also managed to maintain a clear conscience by claiming that, after all, many victims had confessed to their "crimes" and that the Salem, Massachusetts, community had been tricked by the devil. Yet families who had lost loved ones and property during the trials were expected to go on with their lives as if nothing had happened. Their attempts to regain social standing and receive financial compensation through formal legal channels took several years.

But we know the "clear conscience" they claimed wasn't real. Shame caused them to rename Salem Village. It became Danvers.

After the Witch Trials: Welcome to Danvers
By September of 1692, the peak of the witch hysteria was over and 25 innocent people were dead. 19 people were hanged. Five people had died in prison, and one elderly man was pressed to death. The vast majority of those executed came from rural areas, the majority from Salem Village.

After the trials, “in both Salem and Danvers, there was shame over what had happened here and a reluctance to deal with the trauma of the trials,” says Dan Lipcan, a library director and curator of the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.

Slowly, Salem Village—the epicenter of the hysteria—began to move on, building a new meeting house in 1701 and abandoning the bad memories of the former. In 1706, Ann Putnam made a public apology, stating, “As I was a chief instrument of accusing Goodwife Nurse and her two sisters, I desire to lie in the dust and to be humbled for it.”

Putnam made her confession simply to be admitted back into the church, the same faith that supported the lies that caused so much suffering. She didn't list all the other people she falsely accused. Could it be that she couldn't be bothered enough to remember all of their names? According to Dr. John Howard Smith, there were 300 accused.

During that one year, 20 people were executed as witches, which Smith suggested “indicates a certain degree of restraint, considering that nearly 300 people were accused.”

But we also know that it didn't just happen in Salem. It happened in Connecticut, too.

Between 1647 and 1697, about three dozen people (the exact number is disputed, as many court records have been lost) were charged with witchcraft in Connecticut. Eleven were executed, all by hanging. Nine of the 11 were women. The two men executed were hanged along with their wives. Of those who weren’t executed, some fled their community; others were banished.

Having PTSD, we don't need to guess what all of this did to the people involved as victims, nor do we have to imagine what it did to the rest of the people in the area. They knew it could happen to them at any moment. They also knew the truly guilty got away with it once, and nothing could stop them the next time. No one was held to account for anything, and they were "free" to move on from what they did. Those who suffered were never free to move on.

Imagine knowing the accusers were free to continue their lives as if nothing had happened, and there was no reason to feel guilty. Imagine knowing the judges were rewarded for their actions instead of held accountable. This is from the History of Massachusetts Blog.

According to Emerson W. Baker in his book, A Storm of Witchcraft, these nine judges were considered the elite of the Massachusetts Bay Colony:

“As a group, the judges represented the proverbial 1 percent – the merchant elite who were wealthy, intermarried, and exercised power in social, political, and military circles. In short, they were the superrich of Massachusetts. Simply calling them ‘merchants’ shortchanges them…Most had considerable political experience, having served as deputies and assistants in the General Court.”

Look at the site and see what happened to the judges like William Stoughton, Chief Magistrate.

From 1694 to 1699 and again from 1700 to 1701, Stoughton served as acting governor of Massachusetts after Governor William Phips was recalled to England. He also continued to serve as chief justice of the Massachusetts courts until his death on July 7, 1701.

In 1697, Samuel Sewall was the only one to apologize for his part in horrific events. The others simply signed a letter.

And then there was Judge John Hathorne, who "was one of the most vocal participants during the Salem witchcraft trials."

Hathorne’s great-great grandson was Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose works reveal Hawthorne’s guilt over the sins of his ancestor. It is speculated that Nathaniel Hawthorne added the “w” to the family name as a means of distancing himself from the wrongdoing of his great-great-grandfather. It is equally possible this change was merely the result of a fashion of the period, as many families were altering their names to reflect the original English spelling. It is interesting to note that Hawthorne did hold particular disdain for his ancestor, as Judge Hathorne appears as the antagonist Judge Pyncheon in Hawthorne’s 1851 novel The House of the Seven Gables.

When you consider what was done to those accused of witchcraft, imagine being afraid of being the next one to be wrongfully charged, imprisoned, tortured, and held in horrid conditions. At the same time, they not only took what you owned, but they made you pay money for what was done to you before they would release you. Then imagine living the rest of your life while discovering none of them were held accountable for what they did to you.

You don't have to use much energy imagining if you were the victim of a crime and they got away with it. You don't have to imagine it if you saw your day in court and the guilty got away with it because of a technicality. You don't have to if you suffered from medical malpractice, but lawyers said it would cost them too much money to pursue the evidence.

No matter what caused PTSD to strike you after you survived it, it should be easy enough to understand what the people of Salem Town and village, now called Danvers, had to endure. When you read what they went through before the accusations were made, you'll see what we now know as traumas that can produce PTSD.

We are not only aware of what PTSD does to us, we are aware of what our families go through while we suffer.

This research showed that Vietnam Veterans have more marital problems and family violence. Their partners have more distress. Their children have more behavior problems than do those of Veterans without PTSD. Veterans with the most severe symptoms had families with the worst functioning.

We also know that none of it had to happen. As for Vietnam veterans, the research was left out a detail. While it wasn't easy, my husband and I have been married for 40 years. He got help to heal, and so did I. We believed in God, but we also believed in science. Ironically, that's how the people of Salem stopped blaming God and each other when other bad things happened to them.

Kathie Costos author of The Scribe Of Salem, The Visionary Of Salem and 13th Minister Of Salem

Trauma was manufactured in Salem Village

Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
October 6, 2024

In 1692, trauma was manufactured in Salem Village so successfully that it spread beyond the population of 500. Whatever you read or have been led to believe about the witch trials, understand one simple, basic fact. None of the people making accusations were telling the truth. What is worse is they knew it.

If you have PTSD, you survived something. That's the only way for it to inflict your thoughts. As bad as it is, imagine if you discovered the trauma you survived was manufactured by influential people. Then imagine strangers lying and accusing you so forcefully that even your neighbors supported their accusations.

Why would they be willing to do such a sinister thing? Fear it could happen to them if they didn't.

That was how the people of Massachusetts had to live in 1692. It wasn't bad enough that they had to struggle with harsh winters, poor crops, and fear of more attacks by Native American tribes trying to take back their land. They had to cope with far too many people searching for something or people to blame for their suffering.

That was fed by the household of Reverand Samual Parris. People paid taxes and were supposed to give him firewood, but he wasn't paid his salary, and the family often lived in a cold home. Precisely what caused the children to begin making false accusations remains a mystery. They were the spark that started the manufactured traumas. Thomas Putnam used the girls had as a means of revenge against neighbors. After all, he had God on his side since the Reverand was involved. 

Back then, they were easy targets if people did not attend church. Sarah Osborne was one of the first accused because Putnam grudged her. She was ill and didn't attend church, adding to notches against her. She was also the first to die because of the lies. She died in the Boston jail, and her family received a bill for her incarceration as well as the shackles to prevent her from flying away. 

Most people remember Tituba confessing, but she escaped being put to death after she confessed to witchcraft. It was claimed that those who confessed would be judged by God, but it would have been more plausible that she could name more names and be believed. Sarah Good was one of them, but she was pregnant at the time of her conviction. Her four-year-old daughter Dorothy was forced to accuse her mother and confess to witchcraft, as well as join her mother in prison. The townspeople learned the lesson that no one would be spared if they didn't play along, including their own children.

There is a correlation between the witch trials and PTSD. It was something no one got over. Between the guilt the accusers carried and the tormented survivors, no one ever escaped the horrors of that year. They did not believe in science. They believed in God's wrath and the devil. Anyone suffering from the infliction of agony was either in league with Satan or being judged by God. Once the trials ended, the people pushed for a Day of Atonement.

January 14, 1697- The Massachusetts General Court orders a day of public fasting and prayer in atonement for errors made by the colony, including the witchcraft trials. On this day, twelve of the jurors of the Court of Oyer and Terminer sign a statement of apology for their role in the witch trials. In addition, Samuel Sewall, who served as a magistrate in 1692, stands before his congregation while his minister reads a prepared statement aloud. In this declaration, Sewall acknowledges his feelings of shame for his role in the witchcraft trials and asks God to pardon his sins.

It may have occurred to you that you know exactly what they were going through since we go between God causing our traumas or Satan causing the possession of our lives. I know I did when surviving was just the beginning of the battle to survive being a survivor. 

PTSD can happen in our lifetime, no matter how old we are

Journalist Suffers PTSD from Covering War in Gaza, 'Hell on Earth': 'You Can’t Escape' (Exclusive)

PEOPLE
By Vanessa Etienne
September 30, 2024

“When you come back from a reporting assignment, and you're cleaning other people's blood off the bottom of your boots… you don't learn this in journalism school.” Trey Yingst

For Trey Yingst, the smell of barbecue triggers his PTSD. It reminds him of the burning bodies he witnessed in Gaza after war abruptly broke out in October 2023. The smells are eerily similar, he says, adding that his brain struggles to distinguish them.

“I try as much as possible to separate things in my mind, but that can be difficult,” he tells PEOPLE. “The mind will flash back very quickly.”

On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas militants from Gaza launched a surprise terrorist attack on Israel, killing roughly 1,400 people and taking more than 200 others hostage — a day that later became known as “Black Saturday,” which is also the title of Yingst’s new book.

Yingst — Fox News chief foreign correspondent — spent nearly 200 days on the ground covering the war and calls it “one of the scariest assignments I’ve ever had.”

“We were in southern Israel on the morning of October 7 and witnessed the massacre firsthand. There were people that died in front of me and we saw the aftermath… bodies everywhere,” he recalls. “That was when I really started to realize the impact that being a war correspondent can have on your mind.”
read the rest here

It's true; you don't learn what war reporters end up covering in journalism school. You don't know what you'll face during a pandemic in nursing school, and people go from calling you a hero to blaming you for what "hardships" they had to go through because they couldn't do what they wanted when they wanted to. They don't train you to face a massacre at the police academy. They don't train you to face a sniper when you are being trained as a firefighter or to face loss after loss of fellow citizens, as well as colleagues taking their own lives. The truth is, no amount of training can prepare you for when the unthinkable happens.

Some professions come with known risks, and people are not blind to them. Then there are the risks that hit you when you never saw them coming. The only thing you can prepare for is the need to ask for help. Seems like a no-brainer, but it is often the hardest thing to do when you are one of the people helping others for a living.

How do you ask for help when you have it in your mind that you were trained to cope with everything you had to face on your job? By acknowledging they didn't train you for everything because they didn't have a crystal ball to foretell your future. No matter how often they told you they could, they couldn't train you for everything in the military. If they could, there would be no need to pay millions of dollars yearly to research how to find something that worked. Considering the number of suicides in the military and in the veteran community has not gone down, that's a huge clue right there.

But it isn't just a military problem. It is a problem that every trauma survivor has to figure out...how to become a survivor who survives surviving.

We can't talk to "normal" people because they won't understand. At least we don't think they will because we don't give them a chance. It's a lot easier to deny there's anything wrong with us, and we're coping just fine with whatever life did to us. We don't tell them that our way of coping is hiding the pain or numbing it by drinking or doing drugs.

The most prepared people to reach out to share are seniors like me because we know we're all going through our own struggles. We still know how to talk to our neighbors face-to-face or on the phone, just checking in. No one trained us to get old besides our parents, but they couldn't foresee everything our lives would become. We did, however, learn that when we open up, we discover we're not alone. No one would share their heartaches or struggles if they always pretended to be happy. No one trained us, and no one warned us that we could end up with PTSD in our senior years, either.

The other truth is that PTSD can happen in our lifetime, no matter how old we are. 

Will ever see a day when no survivor regrets surviving?

Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
September 19, 2024

1692 had many lessons for us to learn from, but we chose to repeat the same mistakes instead of learning those lessons.

I find myself getting more and more unable to control myself when I hear a lie, especially when in regards to #PTSD. It happened when I was shopping at Home Depot. I had a large witch broom in the shopping cart and was wearing a shirt with "1692, they missed one."

Maybe TMI, but I had it on because my great-niece wanted to see it, so I put on the hat, too. I thought you needed to know how strange I looked when I stopped to talk to a woman after overhearing her talk about 22 veterans a day committing suicide. Had it been the other way around, I don't think I'd be as polite to a stranger who looked like I did and wanted to talk to me. But she was courteous and willing to listen. After all, she was a member of the National Guards.

I corrected the rumor of what she thought to be accurate by pointing out that the number came from the VA in 2012 and clearly stated that the data came from just 21 states with limited data. The majority of veterans committing suicide were over the age of 50, but no one was talking about them. Hell, they still aren't.

And then I told her that if they understood that we, as civilians, battle PTSD after surviving just one event, they'd stop thinking they had anything to be ashamed of. We are discovering that surviving the unthinkable is not the end of our future. It is a new beginning. If we dare to reach out to others, we have the power to deliver someone from evil trying to take over their lives.

PTSD is like no other illness. It is an evil invader, trying to erode hope, making us feel unworthy of surviving what we did, and pushing people away while we need them to help us heal. What we fail to notice is that talking about people losing so much hope, they wanted to end their suffering the only way they knew how, isn't helpful. They need to know that others face the same darkness and discover how they can live happier lives if not perfect ones. It worsens when a veteran hears some people simply repeat a number that isn't real, as if it doesn't matter. They need to hear about the one person they can gain inspiration from because their life does matter to the person talking to them.

The lesson we must learn about the witch trials for this part is simple. Lies were deadly then. People weren't just executed. They were tortured. Family members were tortured. Every villager feared becoming the next accused if they dared to speak. Most people disapproved of what was happening but were too afraid to speak out. PTSD was alive and thriving in Salem Village, but no one knew what to call it other than an affliction. The "victims" needed people to stand up for them in mass and deliver the accused from the evil being committed against them. 

The same holds true now when others are "afflicted" by PTSD because we survived, and no one is talking about how we lose hope in higher numbers because there are more of us. We wait and watch to see how veterans are treated with meaningless slogans, as too many suffer, and we wonder if we will ever see a day when no survivor regrets surviving. 

I left Home Depot wondering why the woman I was talking to told me she knew about the research and still repeated the false number of 22 a day. It wasn't that she didn't care. I thought it may have been because it is what far too many people believed to be true.

Salem Witch Trials and the trauma no one got over

Wounded Times
Kathie Costos
September 12, 2024

When you think about the Salem Witch Trials, you may focus on the 20 innocent people murdered after being accused of being witches. What you probably don't think about is what happened to those who suffered because they lived to tell the tales no one wanted to hear.

We enjoy movies and TV programs that portray witches. One of my favorites was a recent series on Netflix, A Discovery of Witches, which I binge-watched three times.

I was glad I sucked up the fact the protagonist, Diana Bishop, was supposed to be a descendant of Bridget Bishop, and she was a witch, but Bridget was not a witch. She was accused and the first to be hung. Once I could push that fact out of the way, I found A Discovery Of Witches fantastic.

When Matthew Clairmont, a vampire, had to prove he was haunted by those he killed or turned, it was clear he was haunted by what he had done. I never thought that a vampire could be traumatized or any monster. The scene was masterfully done.

Still, I have to wonder why Deborah Harkness, the author of the All Souls series the show was based on, had to include Bridget Bishop as a witch. I feel the same way about other shows I enjoy. If they mention any of the accused as witches, I have to block my ears.

Walk into any store, and you'll find bags filled with Halloween candy, creepy decorations, and costumes. Events are planned to handle the influx of tourists seeking to experience Salem's history as The Witch City. You'll find the Witch Dungeon. There, you can witness a reenactment of Sarah Good's trial. The problem is when the site opens with "Come raise the devil," it doesn't mention the fact the devil was in the accusers, but hell was what the accused had to endure. One of them was Sarah Good's four-year-old daughter Dorothy.

Dorothy Good said her mother, Sarah, was a witch. The problem was a four-year-old would have to be a genius to use the words she said.

During Good’s interrogation, her four-year-old daughter Dorothy “confessed” to witchcraft. Dorothy’s confession implicated Good for black magic, though some believe that Dorothy only “confessed” so that she could be reunited with her mother. Dorothy likewise alleged that her mother had gifted her a snake, or a “witches’ familiar.” Dorothy then showed the magistrates where the snake had sucked her blood, though some suspect that the wound was little more than a flea bite. Dorothy, who bit and pinched her interrogators, was, too, accused of witchcraft. Dorothy remained imprisoned for nine months at Salem Jail, an indefensible experience which left Dorothy mentally impaired.

Yet even the claim about Dorothy where she was held is disputed. Some notable sites say she was transferred to Boston because of overcrowding. Others say she was taken to Ipswitch after that. Salem "Jail" wasn't what we think a jail is. The dungeon was used for the most dangerous prisoners, such as murderers, pirates, and witches. It was dark and rat-infested, and the prisoners were shackled. The stench from human waste, filthy bodies covered with lice, and clothing turning into rags. And then there were the torture sessions. With 300 of the accused being provided room and board in four prisons, no one was released after being cleared of the charges until they paid for their "care," including paying for the use of the shackles. If they couldn't pay for food, they were given bread, water...and nothing more.

That horror was Dorothy Good's young life. It was also the lives of at least seven other children. It was how some spent their last days dying there. Lydia Dustin was one of them. She was held until her passing on March 10, 1693. No one was the same after those horrible months, but it was Dorothy Good's lifelong horror she would never recover from. She was forced to claim that her mother was a witch and that she was one as well. She watched Sarah give birth to her sister Mercy and then watched as Mercy died. She watched her mother being taken from her and never returned. And then spent months as a five-year-old in those horrible prisons.

They didn't know about the term PTSD back then, but they sure as hell knew what it was. 

Those are just some traumatic stories no one wants to remember when they enjoy a good show or are entertained. Most people still think they burned witches in Salem. That didn't happen in Salem, but in Scotland and England, only burned the bodies so they couldn't be buried. Instead of talking about hundreds, we're talking about thousands enduring the terror of being accused and punished for something they didn't do.

The other thing we don't talk about is how the people had the power to stop all of it if they joined forces. Taking a stand when those who did speak out were accused of witchcraft prevented others from trying. They never got over that, either.