By Jim McCausland, Sunset Magazine
I'm very interested in Amy Stewart's work, so I was happy to see Sharon's post about her yesterday. But I think Stewart probably overstated ergot's part the Salem witch trials—if it had any part at all. (Ergot is a fungus that infects grain and can cause hallucinations and erratic behavior in those who eat it.)
My great grandmother, 10 generations back, was a woman named Rebecca Nurse, who was hung for being a witch in those trials. I've spent a lot of time reviewing the trial transcripts to see what really happened. In a nutshell, it started with two girls, cousins, who had seizures that the adults around them blamed on witchcraft. It is these seizures that Stewart attributes to ergot—a charge that has been refuted by academics, and which doesn't make sense to me based on what followed. The afflicted girls singled out a West Indian slave girl named Tituba and two women who were social outcasts as witches. To deflect the anger of the community, they falsely implicated others, who implicated others, who implicated others.
In Rebecca Nurse's case, her family had had a property dispute with the family of the woman who accused her of witchcraft. During the trial, the accusers contended that Nurse used supernatural arts to inflict great pain on them. To bolster their case, when she cocked her head to the side during the trial to hear something more clearly (she was 71 years old, and reportedly hard of hearing), a couple of her accusers jerked their heads to the side and screamed. That kind of thing was obviously theatre designed to get a conviction.
As it happened, Nurse was acquitted by the jury. But sadly, this was before the day when one couldn't be tried twice for the same offense. Nurse was in the presence of others who had been accused when one of them said "she was one of us." When Nurse didn't respond, the jury took it as assent that she was a witch like them. But other explanations are more likely: she didn't respond because she didn't hear, or if she did hear, she didn't respond because she understood "one of us" to mean "one of those falsely accused." But then her accusers and the jury went to the governor and convinced him to override the innocent verdict and hang her, which he did, even after receiving a petition from dozens of people who put their own necks on the line by supporting her.
After the execution, the thing mushroomed until so many people were accusing so many people that the governor finally said "enough!" No more charges were entertained, no more trials conducted, and the thing died away as quickly as it came.
Rebecca Nurse's conviction was reversed posthumously, one of the girls who had charged her admitted to having fabricated the charges—and her house is now the Salem Witch Museum.
John Greenleaf Whittier wrote the following, which is on Rebecca Nurse's granite monument in Danvers, Massachussets.
O Christian Martyr who for Truth could die
When all about thee owned the hideous lie!
The world redeemed from Superstition's sway
Is breathing freer for thy sake today
