Halloween Capital of America

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Photo: Mandelbrot

On the morn­ing of August 19, 1692, in the vil­lage of Boxford, Massachusetts, my col­lat­eral or puta­tive ances­tor Rebecca Eames was arrested and taken in chains to the town of Salem, fif­teen miles away, to be inter­ro­gated in the pres­ence of three young women pur­ported in the indict­ment to have been afflicted, tor­tured, con­sumed, wasted and tor­mented in sundry acts of witch­craft per­formed by the spec­tral body of Rebecca Eames. She had also been observed con­sort­ing with the Devil, a short, dark-complected man wear­ing a black hat and car­ry­ing a book under his arm. Her response to the ques­tions put to her that Friday after­noon was taken down in writ­ing by a local tai­lor recruited more for his nim­ble fin­gers than for his abil­ity to con­strue a sen­tence. Rebecca said that for two or three months she had been in the snare of the Devil — and the tai­lor, whose name was Ezekiel Cheever, wrote it down — the Devil, who appeared to her not as a man but as a small, ugly black horse; she knew not but that he might come once a day as a mouse or a rat; she knew not but that he per­suaded her to fol­low his wicked ways and renounce God and Christ; she knew not but that she gave him soul and body, but she would not own that she had been bap­tized by him. She said, and the tai­lor wrote it down, that she had afflicted Mary Warrin and Timothy Swan by stick­ing of pins, but would not own that she had signed the Devil’s book when he would have had her do it, although when the mag­is­trate asked, Did not the Devil threaten to tear you in pieces? she answered, Yes, he threat­ened to tear me in pieces.

The escort for the trans­porta­tion of witches would often be a pair of con­sta­bles cau­tioned by the sher­iff to avoid eye con­tact with witchly pris­on­ers, who might immo­bi­lize them with a glance; escorts were equipped with man­a­cles and chain to pre­vent pris­on­ers from caus­ing tor­ment­ing effects at a dis­tance by wav­ing their hands; and they car­ried mus­kets with pow­der and ball to ward off Indian war par­ties. Rebecca Eames was fifty– one years old and the mother of six liv­ing chil­dren. We imag­ine her fam­ily fear­ful and thrown into despair by her arrest, but unsur­prised; in mere months 160 women and chil­dren, forty men and two dogs had been accused as witches; from the 157 per­sons dragged into the court of Oyer and Terminer in Salem, forty– four con­fes­sions were extracted and thirty death sen­tences pronounced.

The first to die had been Goodwife Bridget Bishop, accused by twenty-three per­sons of caus­ing ill­ness and death, bit­ing and chok­ing at a dis­tance and forc­ing peo­ple to sign the Devil’s book; as noted by the Reverend Cotton Mather of Boston in books writ­ten by him­self and his col­leagues, she refused to con­fess even in the face of such con­vinc­ing evi­dence against her. I am no witch, she said, and the tai­lor Ezekiel Cheever wrote it down; I am inno­cent, I know noth­ing of it. She was taken in a cart to Gallows Hill and hanged with a bag over her head from the oak tree at the top of the bluff. Two days later, the Wabanaki with their French allies renewed their attacks in the north, con­firm­ing in the words of the Reverend Mather that an army of dev­ils had been set upon the first­born English set­tle­ment suf­fer­ing the effects of “hor­ri­ble witchcrafts.”

In July, six women con­victed for con­sort­ing with the Devil (described var­i­ously as a dark man, a dark man in black, a man in a black hat), and sign­ing his book, were hanged one at a time from branches of the same oak tree at Gallows Hill, each being led or car­ried up the lad­der and then pushed off the rungs to swing in the air. When they had all stopped breath­ing, their bod­ies were taken down and thrown into pits impro­vised among the rocks. Today, the Friday of Rebecca’s arrest, five more witches were sched­uled for hang­ing at noon in Salem: a woman and five men, one of whom had been a sheriff’s con­sta­ble until he refused to arrest accused witches.

Salem lay three hours away from Boxford by horse and wagon. Did one of the con­sta­bles in Rebecca’s escort try to hold back the horse or horses in order to spare the feel­ings of their pris­oner? Or did the other one, per­haps wish­ing to see every­thing that would hap­pen at Gallows Hill, apply the whip? In either case, the wagon rolled along the Andover Road with its heavy bur­den, quickly or slowly, through the bucolic land­scape of field, farm, vil­lage and the dis­tant dark edge of the for­est within which lay the Devil and his dark Aboriginal min­ions. Rebecca Eames had lived all her life in this land, given to the Puritan English by God in a covenant, the terms of which remained obscure after three gen­er­a­tions of war and the exter­mi­na­tion of the Pequod peo­ple, the destruc­tion of the Wampa­noags, and the dev­as­ta­tion of the Narragansetts; yet noth­ing had been secured to God’s peo­ple, and now a plague of witches threat­ened to devour their souls. Such were the forces sweep­ing Rebecca Eames, my col­lat­eral or puta­tive ances­tor, to her fate in Salem.

As they entered Salem by the Town Bridge, Rebecca and her escort were met by a crowd or a mob of men and women on foot and horse­back that surged nois­ily up the road; in their midst was the death cart car­ry­ing the newly con­demned: four men and a woman all stand­ing upright with their hands fas­tened behind their backs. Many in the crowd or mob were shout­ing and offer­ing ver­bal tor­ment. The Reverend Cotton Mather in his black coat and hat rode among them on horse­back; he had trav­elled from Boston to wit­ness the death of George Burroughs, a pas­tor and con­vener of the Hellish Rendezvous — in the words of the Reverend Mather — whose spec­tre had promised Martha Carrier, the sin­gle woman in the cart, described by the Reverend Mather as the Rampant Hag, that she should be the queen of hell.

Rebecca Eames’s escorts were in one mind about what course to take: they lifted her down from the wagon and installed her in her chains in the rear of Goody MacCarter’s house at the bot­tom of the hill. Then they ran out to observe the grue­some scene. After the hang­ing, when all five bod­ies were swing­ing from the arms of the oak tree, the Reverend Mather harangued the crowd from his posi­tion high on horse­back, and Goody MacCarter felt a nee­dle run into her foot. She was stand­ing a short dis­tance away from Rebecca Eames. In the inter­ro­ga­tion that fol­lowed in the after­noon, the mag­is­trate asked Rebecca Eames if she had seen the exe­cu­tions, and the tai­lor wrote down that she said she had seen a few folk, and the woman of the house had a pin stuck in her foot, the tai­lor wrote, but she said that she did not do it. (A look through the Salem Witchcraft Papers held online by the University of Virgina Library reveals that the tai­lor Ezekiel Cheever had been the accuser of two peo­ple who were hanged that day: George Burroughs and Martha Carrier.) The mag­is­trates ordered Rebecca Eames into the dun­geon of Salem Prison, a dank, light­less pit where she was chained to the wall along­side the other accused witches, one of whom, Dorcas Good, was four years old; she had been impris­oned in March after her accusers fell into seizures under her gaze.

Rebecca Eames passed eleven days in Salem Prison, where, as she claimed in a peti­tion later made to the gov­er­nor, she was har­ried out of her senses by her accusers “mock­ing of me and spit­ting in my face say­ing they knew me to be a witch and if I would not con­fess I would be very speed­ily hanged,” before she was able to pro­vide an improved ver­sion of her con­fes­sion. On August 31 she ac­know­ledged and declared in words writ­ten down by the tai­lor Ezekiel Cheever that she had been bap­tized three years ear­lier by the Devil at Five Mile Pond, and her son Daniel, who had been a wiz­ard for thir­teen years, was also then bap­tized, and she had been a witch these twenty-six years. She named Toothaker Widow and Abigail Faulkner, both of whom had already been charged, as sis­ter witches. And the Devil, she con­firmed now, had appeared to her as the mag­is­trate had orig­i­nally sug­gested: in black, as he had appeared to the other witches, and the Devil required that she sign a paper, which she did by mak­ing a black mark. She signed the con­fes­sion writ­ten down in her name by Ezekiel Cheever by plac­ing her mark on the paper:    and next to it an addi­tional glyph that might be inter­preted as fur­ther con­fir­ma­tion of her mark, intended per­haps to indi­cate that only the mark is hers:  the rest may be Ezekiel Cheever’s, or the Devil’s.

No record exists of the trial of Rebecca Eames at the Court of Oyer and Terminer on September 17, at which she was sen­tenced to death; nor do records exist for the tri­als of the other four­teen peo­ple con­demned in that month. The indict­ments and the inter­ro­ga­tions recorded by Ezekiel Cheever and other clerks are the only doc­u­ments that survive.

Rebecca Eames lay in prison for many months await­ing exe­cu­tion, while eight more peo­ple were hanged as witches and one man was pressed to death (over a period of three days) under heavy stones. Her readi­ness to make a proper con­fes­sion prob­a­bly saved her life, as con­fessed witches were often kept alive in the expec­ta­tion that they might help secure new con­vic­tions. She was also spared the fur­ther tor­tures suf­fered by many who insisted on their inno­cence (such has hav­ing one’s ankles fas­tened to the back of the neck until “the blood runs from the nose”).

In January the gov­er­nor put an end to the tri­als after his wife began to appear in the dreams of some of the bewitched. Those who could pay their lodg­ing charges went home; those who couldn’t remained in jail. Seventeen years later, refunds were paid to some of the vic­tims, and Rebecca Eames sent one of her sons to Boston to take back the ten pounds that she had paid for her impris­on­ment. Some of the accusers blamed the Devil for hav­ing set them on a false path. One of the judges made a pub­lic apol­ogy. No one was rep­ri­manded. In 1957 the Massachusetts leg­is­la­ture passed a bill clear­ing the names of the con­victed, with the con­di­tion that the state be absolved of oblig­a­tion to their descen­dants. Sometime dur­ing the twen­ti­eth cen­tury, Salem, Massachusetts named itself the Halloween Capital of America.

In the book he wrote about events in Salem, the Reverend Cotton Mather— rather like George W. Bush pon­der­ing the weapons of mass destruc­tion— doubts that any­thing could “be more Un­accountable, than the Trick which the Witches have, to ren­der them­selves and their Tools Invisible.” One would won­der, he wrote, how the Evil Spirits them­selves can do some things: espe­cially the “Invisibilizing of the Grossest Bodies.”