Witches: The Absolutely True Tale of Disaster in Salem Read Online Free PDF Page A

they bit their own lips and showed bite marks and scratches on their arms and wrists, too, saying that Cory’s invisible powers had made them do it. And if Cory so much as wrung her hands when they accused her, they cried out that she had bruised them by making them wring their own hands. A woman named Mrs. Pope threw a shoe at Cory, and it hit her in the head.
    Ann claimed she had seen Cory praying to the Devil one night outside her window. Then the afflicted girls said they could hear a drum calling all the witches to gather right outside of the meetinghouse. Even Martha’s own husband, Giles Cory, testified against her, blaming her for some very strange things.
    It seems that the previous week he had fetched an ox that was lost in the woods, but it promptly lay down in his yard and couldn’t get up. It just dragged its rear end as if it had been shot in the hip. Before long, though, it got up on its own. Then his cat fell ill all of a sudden and he thought it would die for sure, so his wife told him to knock it in the head. He would not! And just as suddenly, that cat got well. Besides, he said, his wife liked to stay up after he went to bed. He even saw her kneeling in front of the fireplace as if she was saying a prayer, but he heard not a word.
    Right about that time the children cried out that a yellow bird was sitting on Martha. When Magistrate Hathorn asked her about it, she started to laugh. Back to the Salem jail went Martha.
     
    O n March 23, Edward Putnam (Ann Putnam Jr.’s uncle) and a farmer named Henry Keney entered a complaint against a 71-year-old grandmother named Rebecca Nurse, who was sick in bed. Everybody loved and respected Goodwife Nurse, who had raised and educated her eight children to become fine, upstanding adults. Besides, she and her husband, Francis, had always been faithful and loyal to one another and to their family and their religion—how could she possibly be a witch?
    Some people thought Rebecca Nurse’s mother was a witch, so maybe she was a likely target. But was this accusation really a way to take revenge against the Nurse family? Rebecca’s father had often battled with the Putnam family over their farm boundaries. Besides that, Rebecca’s husband had been Salem Town’s constable in the 1670s, and way back then, the Putnam family was rich. The Putnams had gotten into a big legal battle with the Porters, another wealthy family, over whose timberland was whose. As constable, Francis Nurse had arbitrated their dispute, and the Putnam family lost out in the end.

    In all, 10 of 18 depositions against Rebecca Nurse were signed by Putnams, but 2 of the other accusers had grudges against the Nurse family as well. Francis Nurse was a member of the Salem Village committee that voted against paying Reverend Parris’s salary in 1691 in order to drive him out of Salem. And then there was the Putnam family’s 19-year-old servant, Mercy Lewis. Of course she always sided with Ann Putnam Jr. when it came to accusing people of witchcraft. But Francis and Rebecca Nurse had enough money to hire another man to take their son’s place as a soldier in the Indian war. Though this practice was perfectly legal, Lewis, who was orphaned when her family died fighting in the Indian war, might have resented the Nurse family’s good luck.
    To make matters even worse for Rebecca and her relatives, both Ann Putnam Jr. and her mother claimed that Nurse’s two sisters, Sarah Cloyse and Mary Easty, were also witches (and lots of other accusers chimed in). So if the Putnam family, Reverend Parris, and Lewis were out for revenge, they were about to get it.
    Rebecca was taken from her sickbed to appear before the magistrates on March 24. “I can say before my Eternal Father I am innocent, and God will clear my innocency,” she testified. A sympathetic audience believed her until the victims claimed to see the Devil and a whole swarm of his familiars whispering in her ear. Next thing you know, they said