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OLD WITCH HOUSE, SALEM, MASS.
ONE of the most
interesting of the phenomena to be noted by the student of historical houses is
the tenacity of tradition. People may be told again and again that a story
attributed to a certain site has been proven untrue, but they still look with
veneration on a place which has been hallowed many years, and refuse to give up
any alluring name by which they have known it. A notable example of this is
offered by what is universally called the Old Witch House, situated at the
corner of Essex and North Streets, Salem. A dark, scowling building, set far
enough back from the street for a modern
drugstore to stand in front of it, the house itself is certainly sufficiently
sinister in appearance to warrant its
name, even though one is assured by authorities that no witch was ever known to
have lived there. Its sole connection with witchcraft, history tells us, is that
some of the preliminary examinations of witches took place here, the house being
at the time the residence of Justice Jonathan Corwin. Yet it is this house that
has absorbed the interest of historical pilgrims to Salem through many years,
just because it looks like a witch-house, and somebody once made a muddled
statement by which it came to be so regarded.
This house is the oldest standing in Salem or its vicinity, having been built
before 1635. And it really has a claim to fame as the Roger
Williams
house, for it was here that the great "Teacher" lived
during his troubled settlement in Salem. The people of Salem, it will be
remembered, persistently sought
Williams
as their spiritual pastor and master until the General Court at Boston unseated
the Salem deputies for the acts of their constituents in retaining a man of whom
they disapproved, and the magistrates sent a vessel to Salem to remove Mr.
Williams to England. The minister eluded his persecutors by fleeing through the
wintry snows into the wilderness, to become the founder of the State of Rhode
Island.
Mr.
Williams
was a close friend and confidential adviser of Governor Endicott, and those who
were alarmed at the governor's impetuosity in cutting the cross from the king's
colours, attributed the act to his [Williams's] influence. In taking his
departure from the old house of the picture to make his way to freedom, Williams
had no guide
save a pocket compass, which his descendants still exhibit, and no reliance but
the friendly disposition of the Indians toward him.
But it is of the
witchcraft delusion with which the house of our picture is connected rather than
with
Williams and
his story, that I wish now to speak. Jonathan Corwin, or Curwin, who was the
house's link to witchcraft, was made a councillor under the new charter granted
Massachusetts by King william in 1692, and was, as has been said, one of the
justices before whom the preliminary witch examinations were held. He it was who
officiated at the trial of Rebecca Nourse, of Danvers, hanged as a witch July
19, 1692, as well as at many other less remarkable and less revolting cases.
Rebecca Nourse, aged
and infirm and universally beloved by her neighbours, was accused of being a
witch – why, one is unable to find out. The jury was convinced of her innocence,
and brought in a verdict of "not guilty," but the court sent them out again with
instructions to find her guilty. This they did, and she was executed. The
tradition is that her sons disinterred her body by stealth from the foot of the
gallows where it had been thrown, and brought it to the old homestead, now still
standing in Danvers, laying it reverently, and with many tears, in the little
family burying ground near by.
The majority of the
persons condemned in Salem were either old or weak-witted, victims who in their
testimony condemned themselves, or seemed to the jury to do so.
Tituba, the
Indian slave, is an example of this. She was tried in March, 1692, by the
Justice Corwin of the big, dark house. She confessed that under threats from
Satan, who had most often appeared to her as a man in black, accompanied by a
yellow bird, she had tortured the girls who appeared against her. She named
accomplices, and was condemned to imprisonment. After a few months she was sold
to pay the expenses of her lodging in jail, and is lost to history. But this was
by no means the end of the matter. The "afflicted children" in Salem who had
made trouble before now began to accuse men and women of unimpeachable
character. Within a few months several hundred people were arrested and thrown
into jails. As Governor Hutchinson, the historian of the time, points out, the
only way to prevent an accusation was to become an accuser oneself. The state of
affairs was indeed analogous to that which obtained in France a century, later,
when, during the Reign of Terror, men of
property and position lived in the hourly fear of being regarded as "a suspect,"
and frequently threw suspicion on their neighbours the better to retain their
own heads.
We of to-day cannot understand the madness that inspired such cruelty. But in
the light of Michelet's theory, – that in the oppression and dearth of every
kind of ideal interest in rural populations some safety-valve had to be found,
and that there
were
real organised secret meetings, witches' Sabbaths, to supply this need of
sensation, – the thing is less difficult to comprehend. The religious hysteria
that resulted in the banishment of Mrs. Hutchinson was but another phase of the
same thing. And the degeneration to be noted to-day in the remote hill-towns of
New England is likewise attributable to Michelet's "dearth of ideal interest."
The thing once
started, it grew, of course, by what it fed upon. Professor William James,
Harvard's distinguished psychologist, has traced to torture the socalled
"confessions" on which the evil principally throve. A
person, he
says, was suddenly found to be suffering from what we to-day should call
hysteria, perhaps, but what in those days was called a witch disease. A witch
then had to be found to account for the disease; a scapegoat must of necessity
be brought forward. Some poor old woman was thereupon picked out and subjected
to atrocious torture. If she "confessed," the torture ceased. Naturally she very
often "confessed," thus implicating others and damning herself. Negative
suggestion this modern psychologist likewise offers as light upon witchcraft.
The witches seldom cried, no matter what their anguish of mind might be. The
inquisitors used to say to them then, "If you're not a witch, cry, let us see
your tears. There, there! you can't cry! That proves you're a witch!"
Moreover, that was
an age when everybody read the Bible, and believed in its verbal inspiration.
And there in Exodus (22:18), is the plain command, "Thou shalt not suffer a
witch to live." Cotton Mather, the distinguished young divine, had published a
work affirming his belief in witchcraft, and detailing his study of some
bewitched children in Charlestown, one of wham he had taken into his own family,
the better to observe the case. The king believed in it, and Queen Anne, to
whose name we usually prefix the adjective "good," wrote to Governor Phips a
letter which shows that she admitted witchcraft as a thing unquestioned.
It is in connection with the witchcraft delusion in Salem that we get the one
instance in New England of the old English penalty for contumacy, that of a
victim's being pressed to death. Giles Corey, who believed in witchcraft and was
instrumental in the conviction of his wife, so suffered, partly to atone for his
early cowardice and partly to save his property for his children. This latter
thing he could not have done if he had been convicted of witchcraft, so after
pleading "not guilty," he remained mute, refusing to add the necessary technical
words that he would be tried "by God and his country." The arrest of Mrs. Corey,
we learn, followed closely on
the
heels of that of
Tituba
and her companions. The accused was a woman of sixty, and the third wife of
Corey. She seems to have been a person of unusual strength of character, and
from the
first denounced the witchcraft excitement, trying to persuade her husband, who
believed all the monstrous stories then current, not to attend the
hearings or in any way countenance the proceedings. Perhaps it was this
well-known attitude of hers that
directed suspicion to her.
At her trial the
usual performance was enacted. The "afflicted girls" fell on the floor, uttered
piercing shrieks, and cried out upon their victim. "There is a man whispering in
her ear!" one of them suddenly exclaimed. "What does he say to you?" the judge
demanded of Martha Corey, accepting at once the "spectral evidence." "We must
not believe all these distracted children say," was her sensible answer. But
good sense was not much regarded at witch trials, and she was convicted and not
long afterward executed. Her husband's evidence, which went
strongly against her, is here given as a good
example of much of the testimony by which the nineteen Salem victims of the
delusion were sent to Gallows Hill.
"One evening I was sitting by the fire when my wife asked me to go to bed. I
told her that I would go to prayer, and when I went to prayer I could not utter
my desires with any sense, nor open my mouth to speak. After a little space I
did according to my measure attend the duty. Some time last week I fetched an ox
well out of the woods about noon, and he laying down in the yard, I went to
raise him to yoke him, but he could not rise, but dragged his hinder parts as if
he had been hip shot, but after did rise. I had a cat some time last week
strongly taken on the sudden, and did make me think she would have died
presently. My wife bid me knock her in the head, but
I did not, and since
she is well. My wife hath been wont
to sit up after I went to bed, and I have perceived her to kneel down
as if she were at prayer, but heard nothing."
Incredible as it
seems to-day, this was accepted as "evidence" of Mrs. Corey's bewitchment. Then,
as so often happened, Giles Corey, the accuser, was soon himself accused. He was
arrested, taken from his mill, and brought before the judges of the special
court appointed by Governor Phips to hear the witch trials in Salem.
Again the girls went through their
performance, again there was an endeavour to extort a confession. But this time
Corey acted the part of a man. He had had leisure for reflection since he had
testified against his wife, and he was now as sure that she was guiltless as
that he himself was. Bitter, indeed, must have been
the realisation that he had helped convict
her. But he atoned, as has been said, to her and to his children by subjecting
himself to veritable martyrdom. Though an
old
man whose hair was whitened with the snows of eighty winters, he "was laid on
his back, a board placed on his body with as great a weight upon it as he could
endure, while his sole diet consisted of a few morsels of bread one day, and a
draught of water the alternate day until death put an end to his sufferings."
Rightly must this mode of torture have been named
peine
forte et
dure.
On Gallows Hill three days later occurred the execution of eight persons, the
last so to suffer in the Colony. Nineteen people in all were hanged, and one was
pressed to death in Salem, but
there is absolutely
no foundation for the statement that some were burned.
The revulsion that followed the
cessation.
of the delusion was as marked as was the precipitation that characterised the
proceedings. Many of the clergy concerned in the trials offered abject
apologies, and Judge Sewall, noblest of all the civil and ecclesiastical
authorities implicated in the madness, stood up on Fast Day before a great
congregation in the South Church, Boston, acknowledged his grievous error in
accepting "spectral evidence," and to the end of his life did penance yearly in
the same meeting-house for his part in the transactions.
Not inappropriately the gloomy old house in which the fanatical Corwin had his
home is to-day given over to a dealer in antique furniture. Visitors are freely
admitted upon application, and very many in the course of the year go inside to
feast their eyes on the ancient wainscoting and
timbers. The front door and the overhanging roof are just as in the time of the
witches, and from a recessed area at the back, narrow casements and excrescent
stairways are still to be seen. The original house had, however, peaked gables,
with pineapples carved in wood surmounting its latticed windows and colossal
chimneys that placed it unmistakably in the age of ruffs, Spanish cloaks, and
long rapiers.
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