Another girl, 12-year-old Ann Putnam Jr., experienced similar episodes. In January 1692, Parris’ daughter Elizabeth (or Betty), age 9, and niece Abigail Williams, age 11, started having “fits.” They screamed, threw things, uttered peculiar sounds and contorted themselves into strange positions. The Puritan villagers believed all the quarreling was the work of the devil. Controversy also brewed over the Reverend Samuel Parris, who became Salem Village’s first ordained minister in 1689 and quickly gained a reputation for his rigid ways and greedy nature. The displaced people placed a strain on Salem’s resources, aggravating the existing rivalry between families with ties to the wealth of the port of Salem and those who still depended on agriculture. (Salem Village is present-day Danvers, Massachusetts colonial Salem Town became what’s now Salem.) Known as King William’s War to colonists, the conflict ravaged regions of upstate New York, Nova Scotia and Quebec, sending refugees into the county of Essex-and, specifically, Salem Village-in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. In 1689, English monarchs William and Mary started a war with France in the American colonies. Though the Salem trials took place just as the European craze was winding down, local circumstances explain their onset. Tens of thousands of supposed witches-mostly women-were executed. A “ witchcraft craze” rippled through Europe from the 1300s to the end of the 1600s. In the medieval and early modern eras, many religions, including Christianity, taught that the devil could give people known as witches the power to harm others in return for their loyalty. Fueled by xenophobia, religious extremism and long-brewing social tensions, the witch hunt continues to beguile the popular imagination more than 300 years later. Since the 17th century, the story of the trials has become synonymous with paranoia and injustice. But it was only in July 2022 that Elizabeth Johnson Jr., the last convicted Salem “witch” whose name had yet to be cleared, was officially exonerated. In 1711, colonial authorities pardoned some of the accused and compensated their families. More than 200 people were accused of practicing witchcraft-the devil’s magic-and 20 were executed. The Salem witch trials occurred in colonial Massachusetts between early 1692 and mid-1693.
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