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I'm surprised no one has answered this question yet, but it gives me the excuse to share photos of a trip I took back in March, 1996 that definitely has nothing to do with the Civil War! The modest house above belonged to possibly the most famous witch in what is now the United States, Rebecca Nurse of Dedham (Salem), Massachusetts. Of course, the so-called
Witch Hysteria of 1692 is the best-known example of American witchcraft and its baneful legacy.
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The troubles began here at the site of a local clergyman named Samuel Parrish who happened to own a slave named Tituba Indian who apparently was originally from the West Indies. She lived with her husband John Indian who may have been a local native, as his name implies. Tituba was a favorite with Parrish's impressionable daughters and other neighbor girls who imbibed her tales of witchcraft and voodoo. They began to act out the supposed effects of possession, accusing their neighbors of having cursed them in what historian John Demos in his
Entertaining Satan: Witchcraft and the Culture of Early New England suspects may have actually been a land-grab scheme on the part of Parrish and his accomplice and mastermind, one John Putnam who also had a supposedly afflicted daughter. Their initial targets were essentially inoffensive oddball women who lacked influence to protect themselves, including even Tituba herself; this changed when they accused wealthy widow and landowner Rebecca Nurse.
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The notorious
Salem Witch Trials were actually held in neighboring Dedham in the reconstructed Meeting House above. Eventually over twenty accused "witches" and "warlocks"(male witches) were hanged; one poor man named Giles Corey was
pressed to death because he wouldn't "confess" to being a witch! Pressing was a form of legal torture in which the victim was staked to the ground with progressively heavier stones piled atop him until he either confessed or died. The reason he refused to confess was that by doing so one lost all title to land and possessions, which otherwise could pass to heirs. Ironically, confessors were NOT executed, but were imprisoned under beastly conditions - many more died as accused prisoners than those who were hanged as witches - and their property confiscated.
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A Salem landmark is the so-called
Witch House which in fact belonged not to an accused witch but to one of the notorious prosecutors.
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None of those executed lie today in the picturesque Salem Cemetery because as witches they were refused Christian burial in sanctified or consecrated land; as far as I'm aware they were all buried in unmarked graves, the locations of which remain unknown. Rebecca Nurse was at least brought back to her property and buried in an unmarked grave there.
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So affected and guilt-ridden by the events conducted by his ancestors famous Nineteenth-Century author Nathaniel Hawthorne changed the spelling of his name from that of the leading prosecutor Judge Hathorne; his novel
The House of the Seven Gables, set in the preserved structure above, is all about the legacy of the trials. The story of the trials and their aftermath is told today in the Salem Witch Museum, a waxworks inside what was once a Gothic church below, dominated by the brooding statue
The Puritan.
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