America's Hidden Stories Salem's Secrets FULL EPISODE Smithsonian Channel
Category
🐳
AnimalsTranscript
00:00 Salem, 1692.
00:05 Terrified Puritans believe the devil has risen.
00:08 They're convulsing and they're being bitten and choked.
00:11 Right here she says she's first accosted by Satan.
00:15 Nineteen suspected witches are hanged.
00:18 Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.
00:21 But the hidden history of Salem may be very different.
00:25 These people are Christian martyrs.
00:27 They share the idea that truth is more important than even life itself.
00:32 To find out why so many were accused of witchcraft,
00:35 modern historians will enter a lost Puritan world.
00:39 These girls had the power of life and death in their hands.
00:42 They will use high technology to find where the victims were hanged and secretly buried.
00:48 We might be on the spot.
00:50 It may change forever what we thought we knew about the Salem witch hunt.
00:55 The Salem witch trials are the first large-scale government cover-up in American history.
01:00 So there's our proof.
01:05 History may be more shocking than we ever imagined.
01:09 Today, technology forces the past to give up its secrets.
01:15 Newly discovered documents turn history on its head.
01:19 Discoveries in ancient archives reveal startling stories we never knew.
01:25 August 19, 1692.
01:39 A huge crowd gathers to watch five witches being hanged.
01:44 Somewhere in a small Massachusetts town called Salem.
01:49 People traveled from all over.
01:52 It was the most exciting thing that was happening.
01:54 So there was a spectacle element to it.
01:57 The Puritan colony of Massachusetts is in the middle of a panic over suspected witches.
02:07 Neighbor accuses neighbor, and family members turn on each other in an orgy of paranoia and violence.
02:14 The witch scare had begun earlier that year, in January.
02:21 Young women have mysterious fits, thrashing in bed and acting possessed.
02:28 Accusations that girls have been attacked by witchcraft quickly tear through the colony.
02:35 The local ministers believe that the devil is at work.
02:38 The wiles of the devil. The worst of all evils.
02:42 The court takes action to protect the town.
02:45 All witches shall be prosecuted and hanged.
02:49 This is the third day of executions that summer.
02:55 But today's are unusual.
02:57 For the first time in Salem, four of the accused are men.
03:03 One is a Puritan minister.
03:05 Another is a prosperous church-going husband and father, named John Proctor.
03:11 John Proctor is the first man to be accused.
03:17 He's a tavern keeper. He's on seemingly good terms with everyone.
03:20 He's a pretty successful sort of fellow, and very much a God-fearing Christian.
03:25 That an upstanding Puritan church-goer like Proctor is about to hang
03:30 shows just how fevered the witch hunt has become.
03:34 He is the last to die that afternoon.
03:37 To be the last one to be executed on a particular day
03:40 meant you had to watch everybody else be executed.
03:44 Proctor protested his innocence and his unwillingness to die before the gallows,
03:51 that he was an innocent man.
03:54 [music]
03:57 Eight more will hang that summer.
04:08 Then, almost as quickly as it had begun, it is over.
04:13 Puritan authorities come to their senses and halt the trials.
04:18 A blanket of silence falls over the stunned community,
04:21 and any writing or publication about the terror is officially banned.
04:25 The location of the execution site vanishes from any records.
04:29 I really feel the Salem Witch Trials are the sort of first large-scale
04:33 government cover-up in American history, you know,
04:35 hundreds of years before Watergate.
04:38 That cover-up is launched in the fall of 1692,
04:42 when the governor of the colony, Sir William Phipps,
04:45 bans any writing or publication about the witch hunt.
04:49 Books were reported burned in Harvard Square.
04:52 He's essentially trying to bury the fact that innocent lives were lost here.
04:56 Even today, in a town made famous by the witch trials,
05:06 vital information is missing, and questions lie unanswered.
05:11 There's about 900 documents in all, but there are huge gaps.
05:16 It's amazing what we don't know.
05:18 Now, a group of historians has uncovered new information about the witch hunt.
05:23 The executions, the people who had...
05:25 Richard Trask, Marilyn Roach, Tad Baker, and Ben Ray
05:30 have spent their lives researching the witch trials.
05:34 They hope to finally answer its most enduring mysteries.
05:37 Too far in the history of the Salem Witch Trials, but...
05:40 What caused the girls to have thrashing fits and act possessed?
05:46 Fits that no one can diagnose.
05:48 Why had the accusations of witchcraft spread so quickly,
05:52 ripping through the colony like a disease?
05:54 It begins to spread from something small to something large.
05:58 It's going to happen to you.
06:00 And where was the location where those witches were so publicly hanged?
06:04 We had the narrative, but we didn't know where the narrative came to
06:11 its most vicious conclusion.
06:15 Finding the long-lost hanging site could write a final missing chapter
06:20 in Salem's history.
06:22 Salem, the witch city, people don't realize that this is built
06:26 on the death of 19 Christian murders.
06:29 I think it's really important that this site be found and identified.
06:33 The place is worth preserving as a memorial to what happened
06:39 and what should not have happened.
06:42 And there were victims from Salem.
06:45 Richard Trask runs the Peabody Archival Center.
06:48 He grew up here and is a direct descendant of executed witch John Proctor.
06:54 The location of the execution of the accused witches,
06:59 which should be such an important place, was kind of lost to history.
07:05 One book about the trials did escape the Puritan censors.
07:10 It was published in London eight years after the hangings.
07:14 More Wonders of the Invisible World by Robert Califf.
07:18 He was a man who thought injustice was being done and he was going to record it.
07:23 Califf's book gives even more importance to finding the lost hanging site.
07:28 He reported that immediately after the executions,
07:32 the bodies were dumped nearby in a shallow grave.
07:37 This is Califf talking about the execution.
07:41 And he was cut down, he was dragged by the halter to a hole or grave
07:47 between the rocks, one of his hands and his chin,
07:50 and a foot of one of them being left uncovered.
07:54 If the hanging site can be found,
07:57 it's possible that remains of the accused witches
08:00 still lie close by in unmarked graves.
08:04 Inside a secure vault at the Peabody Archives
08:16 are surviving documents from the time of the witch hunt.
08:20 Although publishing books about the witch trials was illegal,
08:24 clues that explain why the witch hunt started are still present.
08:29 The records that started are hidden within 300-year-old court records
08:33 and fading church documents.
08:35 This is where the most important or valuable things are located.
08:39 Richard Trask's daughter, Elizabeth Peterson,
08:42 is studying the family history being passed down from her father.
08:46 She wants to know why her long-ago relative, John Proctor,
08:50 was accused and hanged.
08:52 He's an older man.
08:55 Generally people think of witches as women.
08:58 Well, John Proctor lived in Salem Farms, a little below Salem Village,
09:02 but he went to the Salem Village Church,
09:05 and Reverend Paris was the minister of it.
09:08 Minister Samuel Paris plays a key role in the start of the witch crisis.
09:14 This is the minister's record book,
09:17 and it's in the handwriting of the Reverend Samuel Paris.
09:22 Are these original pages?
09:24 They're original pages.
09:25 Wow.
09:26 March 27, 1692, and he says,
09:30 "The devil hath been raised amongst us,
09:33 and his rage is vehement and terrible."
09:37 The Reverend Paris left more than just words in Salem Village.
09:46 Very few people even realize this is here.
09:49 This is the site of Paris' former home.
09:53 This is where the story really starts.
09:55 This is the beginning of the Salem witch trials.
09:57 Ground zero.
09:59 The shocking events that happened here 300 years ago
10:02 lit the flame that began the witch crisis
10:05 and led to the death of Elizabeth's relative, John Proctor.
10:09 A witch. Absolutely.
10:11 The Puritans had arrived a generation earlier, in 1626,
10:17 seeking to build a pure Christian utopia in the New World.
10:21 The immigrants found themselves in a frightening and often hostile land.
10:26 These are people who advertise themselves as a flock in the wilderness,
10:30 and they very much are.
10:31 They're on the edge of a frontier, and the dark is really palpable.
10:36 When Samuel Paris arrives as the new minister,
10:40 Salem Village is anything but a Puritan utopia.
10:44 It is filled with refugees from a long-running Indian war,
10:47 and property disputes pit neighbor against neighbor.
10:51 Paris preaches that the devil is responsible for Salem's trouble.
10:56 We stand against the wiles of the devil!
10:59 For the women who share his home,
11:01 his wife, nine-year-old daughter,
11:04 eleven-year-old niece, and Indian slave Tituba,
11:08 the devil waits in every corner.
11:11 Imagine these young girls,
11:15 they have their father, Samuel Paris, storming around the parsonage,
11:18 up in his study, writing these fire-and-brimstone sermons,
11:22 saying, "God is terribly angry, Satan has been let loose in our country,
11:26 repent, for your soul burns in eternity in hell."
11:29 This is scary stuff for a nine-year-old, right?
11:32 In January, the young girls begin to act strangely,
11:38 and complain of agonizing pains.
11:42 They say that they're being bitten and choked.
11:44 They're convulsing in various ways,
11:46 their bodies are pretzeling into different postures.
11:49 One of them runs into a fireplace,
11:51 they will shriek, and they will not be able to stop the shrieking.
11:55 For Reverend Paris and the other ministers in the colony,
12:00 there is an obvious diagnosis.
12:02 Witchcraft.
12:06 Tens of thousands of suspected witches
12:10 had been executed in medieval Europe.
12:13 The big problem in the 17th century is that witches are real.
12:17 Everyone believes in witches.
12:19 Ministers, university professors know that they exist.
12:22 The first ominous proof of a witch infestation in Salem
12:27 now comes from Paris' own slave.
12:30 For reasons we'll never know,
12:33 Tituba admits to being the devil's agent
12:35 and casting a spell on the girls in Paris' home.
12:40 It will be her confession that will really make the crisis take off,
12:43 because once she says, "I am practicing witchcraft,"
12:46 it's very hard for anyone to deny the existence of it in the community.
12:49 What actually started all this was inside this parsonage.
12:53 It's right here that Tituba says that she's first accosted by Satan,
12:57 who forces her to afflict the girls.
13:00 The stage has been set for a plague of witchcraft,
13:04 unlike anything the New World had ever seen.
13:08 Witches were traditionally female and lower class.
13:12 But John Proctor is an upstanding businessman and churchgoer,
13:17 with a wife and 16 children.
13:19 So why is Proctor accused of being a witch?
13:23 We'd put this waistcoat on him,
13:31 basically in keeping with the English fashion of the time.
13:34 To help figure it out, a team of historians and costume designers
13:38 are recreating his 17th century world.
13:41 I thought Puritans always wore black.
13:44 Obviously, these are not black clothes.
13:46 Too many 1950s movies, I think.
13:48 Oh, yes, and Thanksgiving pageants.
13:50 Black was an expensive color.
13:53 I know what the clothes are supposed to look like,
13:56 but his, John Proctor's financial standing at the time,
13:59 what would that really have been?
14:01 John was doing really well for himself, but he also,
14:04 he didn't have any sort of official standing in the town,
14:07 which would be a class signifier at that time.
14:09 But he had a very successful farm.
14:11 But John's first two wives were lost to dying relatively young.
14:15 His second wife definitely died in childbirth,
14:19 and so this Elizabeth is his third wife.
14:22 She's in her 40s.
14:24 The primary driving factor of John Elizabeth's marriage
14:27 would have been economic necessity.
14:29 Now, that being said, by all accounts,
14:32 they actually had a very solid partnership.
14:35 She was middle class.
14:37 She enjoyed some material wealth because of John's success.
14:41 But success won't protect them.
14:45 The Salem witch hunt is unique.
14:48 Even the wealthy and pious will find themselves accused.
14:52 In late February 1692,
14:56 the Proctors and much of Salem village watch with fear
15:01 as more girls are stricken with bizarre fits.
15:05 One of them is 13-year-old Anne Putnam,
15:09 whose family connections make her stand out.
15:12 She's the daughter of Thomas Putnam,
15:14 an ally of the Reverend Samuel Parris.
15:17 The whole armor of God!
15:19 He's a man whose father had been the most wealthy,
15:21 most important member in Salem village,
15:23 but he only inherits a small portion of that wealth
15:26 and position.
15:27 He's a fellow with a chip on his shoulder.
15:29 He's got a large family, lots of mouths to feed.
15:32 Like Parris, Thomas Putnam blames his misfortune on the devil.
15:38 He's ready, willing, and able to look for Satan
15:41 and to help root him out and to find the culprits
15:44 in Salem village.
15:45 Suspected witches are investigated
15:47 by the Salem magistrates.
15:51 On March 1st, Anne Putnam tells the magistrates
15:55 that Samuel Parris' slave Tituba has cast a spell on her.
16:00 I saw the apparition of Tituba,
16:02 which did torture me by pricking and pinching.
16:05 Anne Putnam also accuses two other women in town.
16:09 They named Tituba and the two neighbors,
16:12 Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne.
16:14 Like Tituba, neither Sarah Good nor Sarah Osborne
16:18 have money nor many friends in the village.
16:21 They're pretty much the first three people
16:23 you would have voted off the island anyway.
16:26 If the accusations had stopped here,
16:28 we probably never have heard of the Salem witch hunt.
16:31 But that March, the afflicted girls turn on
16:34 a very unexpected target,
16:36 a well-regarded church member, 71-year-old Rebecca Nurse.
16:40 Rebecca Nurse was a Puritan saint.
16:43 She was a very devout woman, a beloved grandmother,
16:46 and a staunch pillar of the community here.
16:49 The Putnams had long feuded with the Nurse family
16:52 over property boundaries.
16:53 In March, Thomas Putnam files a complaint
16:56 on behalf of his daughter against Rebecca Nurse.
17:00 Some historians suspect Putnam is fanning the flames
17:03 of the witch crisis for his own ends
17:05 and may secretly be telling the other girls who to accuse.
17:10 Thomas Putnam seems to play a role
17:13 as the man behind the curtain here.
17:15 Does he suggest names to them?
17:19 Someone's been suggesting, if not directly,
17:22 whispered comments as to who would be bewitching the girls,
17:27 so they know names.
17:29 John Proctor watches the accusation of Rebecca Nurse
17:33 with growing anger.
17:35 He didn't believe in witchcraft, or at least he didn't believe
17:38 in what was happening in Salem Village as witchcraft.
17:42 Soon after the possessed girls accuse Rebecca Nurse,
17:46 Proctor's own servant, Mary Warren, begins to have fits.
17:51 Whatever the reason for Mary Warren's fits,
17:54 Proctor wants them to stop.
17:57 He takes matters into his own hands.
18:01 John Proctor says that he's going to beat the devil out of her.
18:05 He thinks it's all nonsense.
18:07 He doesn't believe it.
18:10 [gunshot]
18:12 Such a beating is nothing unusual.
18:19 Women were dominated by men in Puritan New England,
18:22 with children and servants at the bottom of the social ladder.
18:26 What would life have been like for a servant girl?
18:30 There was a lot of work that needed to be done,
18:33 so you would be sun up, the sun down, constant, I would think.
18:37 Puritans didn't have a sense of teenagerhood
18:40 the way it's like a special life stage right now.
18:44 In "The Crucible," Arthur Miller's play about the Salem witch trials,
18:49 John Proctor has an affair with one of the first young accusers,
18:53 Abigail Williams, and that leads to his undoing.
18:57 That is definitely not what happened.
19:00 The affair between John Proctor and Abigail Williams
19:03 is not just Arthur Miller's fevered 1950s male imagination.
19:07 The real John Proctor was around 60.
19:10 He was not in his mid-30s.
19:12 And the real Abigail Williams was around 11.
19:15 She was not a 17-year-old temptress.
19:18 But does Proctor have an affair with his own servant, Mary Warren?
19:23 John Proctor's a very complex character,
19:26 but you do kind of have to wonder about his relationship with Mary Warren.
19:31 There is even a question that there might have been
19:36 some sort of sexual relationship going on, some kind of sexual abuse.
19:42 And is that fueling Mary's accusation and Proctor's rage when he beats her?
19:48 Later, 20-year-old Mary testifies about pulling Proctor's spirit into her lap,
19:54 and Proctor in turn calls Mary his jade.
19:59 Now that's a really unsettling term,
20:02 and it really kind of implies a woman of low stature or ill repute.
20:08 Whatever the relationship between Proctor and Mary Warren,
20:12 that winter and spring, Salem's power structure is turned upside down.
20:18 If you look at the age of the accusers, it's somewhere around 16,
20:22 so there's definitely a sense here of youth running the show
20:26 and a sort of celebrity status granted to the girls.
20:29 What drove these girls to accuse people that they'd known,
20:33 in many cases their entire lives, as witches,
20:36 which is a capital crime during this time period?
20:39 That's really the million-dollar question, isn't it?
20:43 Several of the female accusers are refugees from the Indian Wars
20:47 and have seen family and friends butchered.
20:51 The Indian Wars play a huge role in that so many of the girls
20:54 who seem to be afflicted by witchcraft have been touched in some way by tragedy,
20:58 have lost family members, have themselves been refugees from settlements.
21:04 At first, John Proctor's beating works.
21:08 Mary Warren apologizes.
21:11 She pins a note on the meeting house and suggests the other girls are lying.
21:18 And so Mary ends up recanting,
21:21 and then a lot of the other afflicted girls go after her for recanting
21:25 because it seems to undermine their authority.
21:29 They begin to turn on her, and she realizes, "My gosh, I'm going to hang."
21:37 So instead, she accuses Elizabeth Proctor, her husband John, of being witches.
21:44 It's a key moment.
21:46 Mary Warren clears her name of suspicion by accusing her masters.
21:50 John and Elizabeth Proctor are charged with witchcraft and thrown in jail.
21:56 Accusations of witchcraft now spread like a terrible contagion
22:01 from the Paris house deep into the Puritan colony,
22:05 and it's about to get worse.
22:10 To figure out why, historians Ben Ray and Marilyn Roach
22:15 are working with graphic artist Edmund Earle.
22:18 This is a copy of the original manuscript.
22:21 Ben has spent decades pouring over 300-year-old documents,
22:25 attempting to map how the accusations spread.
22:28 So not only do these documents tell you, say, where it would happen,
22:32 but it says when, and from that you can chart the accusations
22:35 as they happen through the course of the year?
22:37 Exactly.
22:39 There had been witchcraft scares in New England before,
22:42 but nothing approaching the violence of that terrible summer in 1692.
22:49 Ben believes that mapping the spread of the panic
22:52 reveals clues that explain why Salem spun out of control.
22:58 Edmund builds a three-dimensional visualization of the witchcraft outbreak.
23:03 So Ben, on February 29th, you see the first three?
23:06 Yes.
23:07 And if I play, you'll watch the days progress up at the top,
23:11 and you can watch as the accusations spread out.
23:18 One reason the witchcraft accusations spread so quickly,
23:22 the magistrates permit the use of something called spectral evidence,
23:28 evidence that only the accusers can see.
23:32 And it's essentially the idea that if the bewitched can see something,
23:36 that something is real, even if the rest of us can't see it.
23:40 So that if one of the bewitched girls says,
23:42 "This particular suspect is stabbing me at this particular moment,"
23:45 and that is not obvious to anyone else in the court,
23:47 it still remains true and incontrovertible.
23:51 In April, when suspected witch Bridget Bishop
23:53 is examined by magistrate John Hawthorne,
23:56 accusers Abigail Williams and Anne Putnam say the ghost,
24:00 or specter of Bridget Bishop, is attacking them.
24:05 Bridget tells the magistrate she has nothing to do with the girls' torments.
24:14 Hang the witch!
24:15 Bridget Bishop is found guilty and hangs on June 10th.
24:20 She's the first accused witch to die.
24:24 It's a key moment visible on the map.
24:27 Do you see a pause? There's nothing new appearing on your screen, right?
24:31 There's an important transition point here.
24:33 There's a pause for about three weeks after Bridget Bishop is executed on June 10th.
24:39 There's something significant going on there.
24:41 They're beginning to doubt.
24:44 The map suggests the authorities are concerned.
24:50 The judge in charge of the special court trying witches,
24:53 William Stoughton, is a hardliner.
24:56 He's in favor of spectral evidence.
24:59 But the governor of the colony wants a second opinion
25:03 and asks the Puritan church establishment to weigh in.
25:06 Is spectral evidence acceptable?
25:10 The court will go to the Massachusetts ministers for advice.
25:12 They're out of their depth.
25:14 They're not entirely certain how to adjudicate the witchcraft.
25:17 They've never had an epidemic of this size.
25:20 They really need to know what actually they're meant to be looking for.
25:24 The ministers in Boston say,
25:26 "Well, we don't like the evidence because it's spectral,
25:29 but on the other hand, we know there are witches, so go after them."
25:33 Oh.
25:35 Spectral evidence now has the church's blessing.
25:39 The bureaucracy of death moves into high gear.
25:44 Making matters worse, Judge Stoughton permits huge crowds inside the courts.
25:50 You would have had a terrified person standing about to be examined,
25:55 and then you would have pews and pews and pews,
25:58 people lining the walls waiting to see what was going to happen.
26:01 Why do you seem to act witchcraft before us?
26:04 By the motion of your body, which seems to have influence upon the afflicted.
26:08 I know nothing of it.
26:09 Hunting witches has become a spectator sport.
26:13 And it's been argued that one of the reasons
26:15 that the accusations become so fantastical with the afflicted girls
26:19 fainting, screaming, is that the people coming
26:23 and wanting to see the performance of this behavior
26:26 encourage the afflicted girls basically to play it up because of the attention.
26:35 Ben says the map reveals another key factor gleaned from the 300-year-old documents.
26:41 So it starts what you might call phase two.
26:45 We're going to get this spread out further across eastern Massachusetts,
26:50 and that's because the word has kind of gotten out that if you confess,
26:55 you will not be brought to trial at least immediately.
26:59 But to authenticate your confession,
27:01 not only do you have to describe the kind of witchcraft you do,
27:05 you have to name someone.
27:07 And they name two or three people.
27:10 If you confessed, you were spared the rope,
27:13 but you were expected to turn in someone else.
27:17 The outbreak map illustrates how the court system
27:20 creates a feedback loop of paranoia and violence.
27:25 It's Samuel Harris who's at the center of it all.
27:28 He says this was a plague-like experience.
27:33 It is a summer of pure terror.
27:35 Neighbor accuses neighbor.
27:37 Family members turn on each other.
27:39 And on July 19th, five are hanged,
27:43 including 70-year-old church member Rebecca Nurse.
27:49 And the number of men, women, and children in prison keeps growing.
27:54 The jails of Massachusetts are full to bursting.
27:57 There have never been this many witchcraft accusations
27:59 in the entire rest of Massachusetts history.
28:03 Blacksmiths are busy forging shackles to restrain the accused.
28:07 All right, you going to help me?
28:09 Because I don't know that I can even do this myself.
28:12 One of the accused witches in prison
28:14 is Elizabeth Peterson's long-ago relative, John Proctor.
28:19 Was he jailed like this and probably shackled as well?
28:22 Absolutely.
28:23 This is what it would have looked like for John Proctor
28:26 the whole time he was in prison.
28:29 For his wife, Elizabeth, things are even worse.
28:33 She's pregnant.
28:35 Also jailed is Dorothy Good,
28:38 the five-year-old daughter of Sarah Good,
28:40 one of the first accused.
28:43 Why did they put witches in these shackles?
28:47 They put them in shackles because iron has magical qualities, they thought.
28:50 It could stop witchcraft and evil from happening.
28:53 So as long as you're shackled like this,
28:55 you couldn't hurt anybody if you were a witch.
28:59 On July 19th, Dorothy becomes an orphan.
29:03 Her mother is also found guilty and hanged.
29:08 In prison, John Proctor's 16-year-old son, William, is tortured.
29:14 Proctor writes a desperate petition to the church.
29:18 The courts are rushing to judgment,
29:20 and torture is being used to win confessions.
29:23 And so this is going to come up here.
29:25 Volunteer Jack Kaplan demonstrates how it might have happened.
29:30 Here's what he says.
29:32 "My son, William Proctor, when he was examined,
29:35 because he would not confess that he was guilty when he was innocent,
29:39 they tied him neck and heels till the blood gushed out of his nose."
29:44 Oh my gosh.
29:45 "We humbly beg that you would have these magistrates changed,
29:50 hoping you may be the means of saving the shedding of our innocent bloods."
29:55 This is his last-ditch plea when he writes to the ministers in late July,
29:59 asking them to use the proper rule of evidence.
30:01 He even asks for a change in venue.
30:04 And we move the proceedings to Boston, but his pleas fall on deaf ears.
30:10 On August 5th, the special court preserves its nearly 100% conviction rate,
30:16 finding John Proctor and his wife, Elizabeth, guilty.
30:21 Two weeks later, Proctor finds himself riding in a cart to be executed.
30:26 It takes him and the four other accused witches through the streets of Salem.
30:32 There must have been a great crowd.
30:34 People would have been all along the route and maybe following it
30:37 to see what happened when they get to the gallows.
30:42 A huge crowd gather to watch the accused die at a site somewhere in this town.
30:51 They were about to witness the darkest hour in the history of purit New England.
30:57 In Salem, witch executions would have been horrific.
31:03 So most hangings back then were short-distance hanging.
31:09 Dr. Ralph Riviello is a specialist in forensic medicine.
31:13 Unlike what we know nowadays about hangings, where it's done to break the person's neck
31:19 to have a merciful death, this is far from it.
31:22 So it's not a quick death.
31:23 No, it's not. It's actually strangulation.
31:28 Before Proctor's own execution, he'll watch four others hang,
31:32 the most shocking of which is a Puritan minister, George Burroughs.
31:37 Our Father, which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.
31:41 Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
31:45 Burroughs stuns the crowd with his final words.
31:50 He manages to say the Lord's Prayer while on the ladder.
31:53 The effect of that is hard for us to understand, but to a 17th century New Englander,
31:58 a witch was unable to utter the Lord's Prayer.
32:01 But deliver us from evil.
32:03 The prayer spoken from the hangman's ladder is nearly too much for the crowd.
32:08 There will almost be an attempt to intervene and to stop the execution.
32:13 Instead, another Puritan minister, Cotton Mather,
32:17 tells the crowd that reciting the Lord's Prayer is a diabolical trick.
32:23 Mather will remind them that this is a meaningless act
32:26 and that this is a very dangerous man, and the execution will proceed.
32:30 Cotton Mather said, "Even the devil can be disguised as an angel of light
32:35 just because he looks innocent. He's not."
32:38 And then the hangman pushes Reverend Burroughs off the ladder to strangle.
32:46 So that rope locks the carotid arteries, jugular vein, the trachea, the windpipe.
32:52 That period is followed by convulsions or shaking, seizure activity.
32:58 The final spasms of agony could have been seen as evidence of witchcraft.
33:04 I'm sure a lot of people in the crowd felt it was the demons or the witches leaving their body.
33:09 Right.
33:12 John Proctor would have witnessed all of that and was soon thereafter to follow to his death.
33:19 Finally, John Proctor, as unlikely a witch as could be, has walked up the hangman's ladder.
33:27 Get him up the ladder here. Here.
33:34 You're going to get the noose over his head, and that's just a simple slip.
33:39 Ralph, what is it, turned off the ladder? Is that the expression?
33:42 Turned off the ladder, yes.
33:46 Turn him off the ladder.
34:00 This is the place where Christian martyrs had been executed,
34:04 where perhaps the best and the worst of Puritan New England had faced each other.
34:11 The historians believe that if they can find the site,
34:14 it will write a final chapter in the Salem story.
34:19 For years, legend had it that the witches were executed at the highest point in town,
34:24 a spot named Gallows Hill.
34:28 But 19th century historian Sidney Purley suggested the location was lower down and closer to town.
34:36 The historians agree.
34:38 Gallows Hill would have been too steep for a cart and too far to attract a big enough crowd.
34:45 You need to transport people from the city jail outside to some elevated place
34:52 where the executions can be seen as an example to everyone.
34:57 It's visible, but not in someone's backyard.
34:59 I equate it to the crucifixion of Jesus, which took place outside the walls of Jerusalem at Golgotha,
35:05 which is this rugged hillside.
35:08 There was one document which was the questioning of Rebecca Ames.
35:12 Marilyn Roach has made a discovery in the 300-year-old documents.
35:16 It's a courtroom interrogation of another accused witch, Rebecca Ames.
35:21 She may have seen the hangings.
35:24 She was asked if she was at the execution.
35:27 She was at the house below the hill.
35:29 She saw a few folk being executed, the house below the hill.
35:33 House below the hill.
35:34 So she is...
35:36 By studying old maps, Marilyn thinks she's identified the house below the hill
35:41 where Rebecca Ames might have seen the hanging.
35:47 19-1.
35:48 I see a number 15 and a 17.
35:51 So listen, he's number 19.
35:53 Well, it's a laundromat.
35:56 Yeah, well.
35:57 Rebecca is being taken to court along the main road.
36:00 At the same time, the crowd is gathered to watch John Proctor and the other accused witches hang.
36:09 Her guards, I think, didn't want to miss the excitement,
36:12 so they put her in one of the houses in the vicinity where she then observed people being hanged.
36:20 In the 17th century, there were only a couple of houses on the street.
36:24 Their map suggests that in 1692, this house would have had a clear view of high ground.
36:32 Right over there, straight.
36:35 But today, any view is obscured by trees.
36:41 Is this really the long-lost hanging site, behind an auto body repair shop, off a busy street?
36:49 Ben and Marilyn show their calculations to graphic artist Edmund Earle.
36:54 So you're saying that you have records that there's one of these houses
36:58 where you could actually see where the hangings would have been?
37:01 Yes.
37:02 We were most interested whether from this house, what you could see here.
37:08 Edmund has taken the old maps and Ben's calculations
37:12 and built a three-dimensional view of a 17th century world.
37:17 There's a testimony from Rebecca Ames, who was arrested in Boxford that morning.
37:22 They asked her, "Did you see what was going on?"
37:25 And she said she was in the house below the hill, somewhere along here,
37:30 and she could see folks being hanged.
37:33 Is it possible to see what the street view would be like
37:35 if you were looking out the front door of this house?
37:38 This is the house Marilyn and Ben had visited earlier.
37:42 Edmund zooms his virtual camera back through the centuries.
37:47 So if we go way in, what do you see? Can we look up?
37:50 Oh, that's good.
37:51 And there you see it.
37:53 The trees are now stripped away, and the view of the high ground is clear.
38:01 The team is almost certain they have located the long-lost hanging site.
38:07 This is the vantage point from right in front of the house.
38:09 There's people up there being hanged.
38:11 Exactly.
38:15 A three-dimensional graphic is one thing.
38:18 Now they want to investigate the site itself.
38:21 The location they identified now sits in the middle of a suburban development.
38:26 So we must be close.
38:28 Yep.
38:33 We're in someone's backyard here.
38:35 But it looks like it might be the place, doesn't it?
38:37 And look, there's a high ledge right there at the top.
38:41 The high ledge would have been visible from the street below.
38:45 This is the hanging site of the Salem Witches.
38:49 So we might be on the spot.
38:51 For 300-plus years, it hadn't been marked.
38:55 Hello.
38:56 Tom Brophy, a retired fireman, grew up in this house,
39:00 where stories have been passed for generations.
39:05 When we were little kids, my parents and some of the neighbors used to say,
39:09 "Watch this land over here.
39:11 Someday it'll be very important."
39:13 Witches, you know?
39:14 So your family always knew.
39:15 They had heard rumors that the original site was right in this general area.
39:20 Wow.
39:22 If this is the hanging site, are the remains of the Salem Witches buried here?
39:29 A 2017th-century book reported that the dead had been buried nearby.
39:35 The witches were considered unclean, forbidden Christian burial,
39:39 and dumped in a mass grave.
39:42 He was dragged to a hole or grave between the rocks about two foot deep.
39:50 Now stretch the tape out to that tree down there.
39:53 Geologist Peter Sablock is helping the team search for the rock crevice
39:57 where the remains were thrown.
40:00 The ground-penetrating radar he's brought
40:02 fires electromagnetic pulses thousands of times a second.
40:06 They bounce back when they hit different soil and rock layers
40:10 to reveal what's hidden below the surface.
40:13 As we're doing some readings,
40:15 will this basically show us if there was some body buried?
40:19 What it will show us is disturbed ground.
40:23 And this is showing basically very little soil.
40:26 Very, very little soil.
40:28 The bedrock lies close to the surface, except in one place.
40:33 You can see the whole string of it.
40:37 This is the crevice.
40:38 That is the crevice.
40:40 That is the best candidate.
40:43 The dead were buried here,
40:45 but the mass grave was shallow and never meant to be permanent.
40:50 But none of those fractures extend deep enough
40:53 to enter a body for 300 years.
40:56 There is virtually no chance that there are any remains at all.
41:00 It's just too close to the surface here.
41:04 But that may not be where the Salem story ends.
41:09 Legend has it that some of the bodies, including John Proctor's,
41:13 were stolen in the darkness after the executions.
41:19 It all kind of culminates with these people being hung,
41:22 but we don't really hear what happened afterwards.
41:25 Researcher Kelly Daniels and Tad Baker
41:28 are both fascinated by a legend that John Proctor's family
41:32 had stolen his body from the mass grave at the hanging site.
41:37 Is that story true?
41:39 And if so, where had they reburied him?
41:44 I've always been interested in these family traditions
41:46 and families like John Proctor about coming to claim their loved ones
41:51 and give them proper burial.
41:53 Yeah, it's definitely a detective story.
41:55 I think it's a solvable mystery.
41:58 When she arrived at her new job at the Peabody Historical Society,
42:02 Kelly discovered the research notes of a Salem investigator from the past.
42:07 In the 1800s, William Upham had interviewed
42:10 surviving relatives of John Proctor.
42:13 He began talking to Proctor descendants,
42:16 one of which mentions her aunt pointing to a spot on a rocky hill
42:21 on this 15-acre plot and saying that was where
42:24 our ancestor of witchcraft notoriety was buried.
42:28 Modern tools allow for the next steps in a 200-year-old investigation.
42:34 This image is this satellite image that doesn't have too many trees
42:37 where you can actually see the property boundaries pretty clearly.
42:41 Even the stone walls there.
42:43 And that X marks the spot right there.
42:45 X marks the spot.
42:48 The location is on land that Proctor once owned,
42:51 off a main road from Peabody near the local high school.
42:55 Absolutely. This is the boundary line, right?
42:57 So really marking that northeast corner of John Proctor's property.
43:01 John Proctor had been found guilty of witchcraft,
43:04 a crime worse than murder.
43:07 Removing his body for reburial would have been hazardous.
43:12 This element of secrecy is almost purposeful
43:14 on the part of the family members,
43:16 at least directly after the witch trials.
43:19 And John Proctor was buried in the rocks.
43:21 Right up in here is the northeast corner.
43:25 We don't really hear what it would have been like
43:27 for the families who had to take the bodies of their loved ones
43:30 out of a crevice and by dark of night bring them up a brook
43:34 into a quiet corner of their family's land.
43:37 So we can imagine his adult sons coming up Proctor's brook,
43:41 maybe taking some sort of wagon to carry their father's body
43:44 up this hill and entering him in kind of a faraway corner of their land.
43:48 Right.
43:50 This is the location William Upham had guessed
43:53 was John Proctor's final resting place.
43:56 Tad and Kelly agree.
43:58 You know, it all makes perfect sense.
44:00 It all fits up.
44:02 Unfortunately, a school was built nearby in the 1970s
44:09 and the ground heavily disturbed.
44:13 You can see the stone wall is just completely destroyed up in here.
44:16 So here's the question.
44:18 I mean, what are the chances of Proctor actually still being here?
44:21 I think based on the fact that it's been disturbed
44:24 for utilities and construction up here, I think they're pretty slim.
44:29 But pretty clearly this was the spot where the family said
44:32 they brought John Proctor.
44:35 John Proctor's body had been carried here in secrecy and darkness.
44:41 A political cover-up had further hidden the true story of the Salem witches.
44:47 But three centuries later, the historians may finally have answers
44:51 to some of the witch trial's biggest mysteries.
44:56 Why had the young girls acted so strangely that year,
45:00 having violent fits and accusing so many others?
45:04 There is a modern phenomenon which is called conversion disorder,
45:08 which is when your body expresses emotional stress through physical symptoms.
45:14 Some of the accusers, like Ann Putnam, may have been doing the bidding
45:17 of older adults such as her father,
45:19 but others were refugees from the Indian Wars and worked as servants
45:23 in a life of obedience, fear, and occasional violence.
45:26 They're literally terrified.
45:28 They're not faking when they're screaming, yelling, having convulsions, fits.
45:33 I go along with the theory that some of it is conversion disorder,
45:38 hysteria it used to be called, where if someone is afraid enough,
45:42 they can convulse or think that they have been wounded.
45:48 Although it may never be possible to know with certainty,
45:52 for these young accusers, pointing fingers may have been a reaction
45:56 to the stress of daily life.
45:59 My take is that the afflicted girls at Salem were living in a moment
46:05 of incredibly rigid class and gender hierarchies,
46:09 and the only way that their culture had to express that tension,
46:14 to let that steam off, was in the form of a witch trial.
46:19 And perhaps the biggest question of all,
46:24 why had the accusations spread so fast, like a virus?
46:29 The Massachusetts judges allowed spectral evidence
46:32 and encouraged citizens to accuse their fellow villagers.
46:36 They are at the very heart of what makes the Salem Witch Scare unique.
46:43 These are experienced judges.
46:45 They've served in cases of witchcraft before where they'd let people go.
46:49 So what caused things to change in 1692?
46:53 The head of the special court trying the witches
46:57 was a hardline former preacher, Judge William Stoughton.
47:02 He's buried in an ornate tomb in Dorchester Cemetery.
47:08 Elizabeth Peterson is visiting the tomb with Stacey Schiff and Tad Baker.
47:13 There he is in the middle of Dorchester. Oh my gosh.
47:15 This is it. This is it.
47:17 Stoughton signed the death warrant for 18 witches,
47:24 including Elizabeth's relative, John Proctor.
47:28 Why do you think Stoughton was like this?
47:31 He really clearly believes fervently that he is doing a public service.
47:36 For Stoughton, this is a holy war.
47:40 Indians are laying siege to the frontier.
47:43 Satan is assaulting from within.
47:46 And the authorities need to show England they can take a firm hand.
47:50 He sees that Massachusetts needs moral reformation.
47:55 We need to come get back into church.
47:57 We need to get out of the taverns.
47:59 And that's how we're going to save the colony.
48:04 On September 22nd, eight more witches are hanged.
48:08 But by late October, growing criticism of the trials
48:12 leads the governor to close the special court
48:14 and begin emptying the jails of suspected witches.
48:18 One of the judges on the court, Samuel Sewell,
48:24 will later apologize for his role in the hangings.
48:28 And years later, chief accuser Anne Putnam will also say she is sorry.
48:34 But until his death in 1701,
48:38 William Stoughton remains unrepentant.
48:41 After the trials were over, he was asked,
48:44 "What do you think about your role?"
48:47 And he says, "I never had any question about it.
48:50 I was doing God's work."
48:54 And finally, where had the witch trial victims been so publicly hanged?
48:59 Here, on a hillside in Salem, Massachusetts.
49:05 On July 19th, 2017, the site was recognized with a memorial
49:11 built just below the ledge where the accused witches were hanged.
49:16 The shadow from Proctor's Ledge may be long and enduring,
49:21 but it does not obscure us from that fuller understanding of our common humanity.
49:25 The memorial is gratifying for the historians who helped find the hanging site.
49:34 History is about place.
49:38 I think the narrative comes to, in this place,
49:41 a kind of ennobling conclusion,
49:44 because these are people who transcend the rest of us.
49:51 If people can be reminded of the real story,
49:54 it should help, I hope,
49:57 and do honor to the people who suffered.
50:00 Those who escaped the hangman suffered, too.
50:04 Elizabeth Proctor survived because she was pregnant,
50:08 but she spent the rest of her life fighting to clear her name
50:11 and win restitution for herself and a son she called John.
50:17 As many as 100 million Americans may be descended
50:21 from those accused of witchcraft in Salem.
50:24 And when you look at these 19,
50:28 the thing that makes them unusual isn't their personalities,
50:34 but the one thing they shared in common was the idea
50:38 that truth is more important than even life itself.
50:41 The rocky ledge where the accused witches were hanged,
50:46 today, is a memorial to those martyrs
50:49 and a tribute to the many historians
50:52 who would not let their story die.
50:55 [music]
50:59 [music]
51:04 [music]