Their Arms, Necks, and Backs Were Turned This Way and That, and Returned Again, So As

“Their arms, necks, and backs were turned this way and that, and returned again, so as it was impossible for them to do of themselves and beyond the power of any epileptic’s fit or natural disease.” – One who saw Betty Parris, Abigail Williams, and their friend in 1692

Betty Parris and Abigail Williams:

Bewitched or Bored?

Salem Village, Massachusetts, 1692

In 1630, more than a thousand Puritans came to what was now called the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Instead of starting their own church, Puritans wanted to “purify” the Church of England by taking power from priests and letting the members of the church run it themselves. King James I didn’t like that idea. In the next decade twenty thousand more British settlers arrived in New England with tools and weapons, clearing fields and pushing back the wilderness – and the Indians – bit by bit. Salem Village – now Danvers – was about twenty miles north of Boston and just inland from the seaport of Salem. It was there that two girls started an unforgettable episode that is still a mystery today.

Betty Parris and her cousin Abigail Williams grew up in the parish house on Andover Street in Salem Village, a short walk across the common from the meetinghouse where Betty’s father, the Reverend Samuel Parris, preached each Sunday. Betty was frail and sickly, but Abigail was a sturdy blond-haired girl who had been taken in as an orphan by the Parris family. Betty was often excused from chores, but Abigail worked hard to earn her keep.

The seating arrangement for Sunday services at the meetinghouse was like a social blueprint of the whole town. The richest people, church officials, and military officers – addressed as “master” and “mistress” – sat proudly in front, men on one side of the central aisle and women on the other. Behind them were the adults of the middle class, called Goodman and goodwife. Poorer people, called only by their given names, arranged themselves in the rear pews. Children sat in the very back with slaves and servants. In the winter it got so cold that some children brought their dogs along so they could bury their hands and feet in warm fur.

Each Sunday, Betty and Abigail listened to Betty’s father set forth the rules of Puritan conduct. He warned worshipers against “unnecessary gazings to and fro, or useless whisperings, much less noddings and nappings.” He reminded the children that “Jesus was full of business for his heavenly Father but yet he neglected not obedience to his Parents.” And he warned: “Wise parents won’t suffer children to play with their food.” Disobedience, he said, should be answered with “strokes issuing from parental love.”

During the winter of 1691, when Betty was nine and Abigail eleven, they sometimes invited friends over to sit by the kitchen fire and listen to Tituba, the family’s slave, tell stories. Tituba was a wrinkled, brown-skinned woman, bent from a lifetime of hard work. Reverend Parris had purchased her on the island of Barbados and brought her to Salem with her husband and small son. Tituba told the girls the stories she had heard from the older slaves she had grown up with. Some may have been stories from her ancestral Africa, stories of animals that could talk with human voices and, perhaps, evil demons that preyed on children.

That winter the girls liked to play a game called the Venus glass. They dropped an egg white into a glass of water and watched it dissolve into patterns. Supposedly, a girl could predict what kind of job her future husband would have by the way the egg broke up. One night Abigail dropped her egg and peered into the glass. What she saw didn’t remind her of any job at all: Abigail thought she saw a coffin.

Soon after, Abigail and Betty began to act strangely. Their parents sometimes discovered them crouched under tables, twisting their bodies in strange ways and howling like animals. They swore that someone was pinching them all over. Their behavior became the talk of Salem Village. Most Puritans believed that Satan could convince ordinary people to serve him. His men were called wizards and his women witches. Nearly everyone remembered that just a few years before, the Goodwin children of Boston had behaved the same way. Boston doctors had examined them and diagnosed “hellish Witchcraft.” A Boston woman had been identified as a witch and hanged in public.

Suddenly, Abigail Williams and Betty Parris were the center of the town’s attention. Their previously chore-filled lives had become exciting, though in a terrifying way. Soon other Salem girls began to show the same signs. One day in church, twelve-year-old Anne Putnam screamed out loud that there was a yellow bird on Betty’s father’s head. Most agreed only Satan could have made her do such a thing.

By February of 1692, Betty and Abigail’s symptoms worsened. Now they said they could see the shadowy forms of people hitting and pinching them. A doctor pronounced them “under an evil hand.” The whole community began to fast and pray for the girls. Town leaders gathered in the Parris home to pressure the girls into naming the witch who had afflicted them. “Who is it that you see?” they demanded. “Who is doing this to you?”

No one knows what Betty and Abigail were thinking. Maybe they really believed they were bewitched, or maybe they started out trying to get some attention and then lost control of the situation. Or maybe both. If they were acting, it would have taken real courage for them to back down and face the scorn of everyone in town and probably receive severe punishments. But they didn’t back down. Instead, Betty, Abigail, Anne Putnam, and their friend Elizabeth Hubbard named their witch: Tituba. And then they “cried out upon” two other village women: Sarah Good and Sarah Osburn.

On March 1, 1692, an excited crowd packed the meetinghouse for a public hearing. The three women were accused of witchcraft. While Sarah Osburn and Sarah Good denied every charge, eight girls sat in front, sometimes rolling on the floor and babbling in strange tongues. Then it was Tituba’s turn. Amazingly, she confessed. She said the other two accused women were also witches who rode with her on broomsticks and had made her hurt Betty and Abigail. The three women were sent to jail in Boston. Sarah Osburn died in prison and Sarah Good was hanged in public. Tituba was released and sold to another family.

Soon more and more girls and young women began to have fits. Order broke down in the town as it became infected with witch fever. Reverend Parris’s group prayer meetings only seemed to make things worse. Neighbors began to accuse one another of working for the Devil.

Terrified people were bullied into false confessions. No one felt safe. Many were thrown into prison, even Sarah Good’s five-year-old daughter, Dorcas, who was chained to her mother’s leg.

Probably no one will ever know for sure what really caused the girls of Salem to act as they did. Years later, a few gave some clues. One Sunday in 1706, Anne Putnam rose from her pew at the Salem Village meetinghouse and begged forgiveness. “It was a great delusion of Satan that deceived me in that sad time,” she explained. Another admitted that it had been a game to her. “It was for sport,” she said. “I must have some sport.”

If so, it was a very deadly game. In all, more than one hundred residents of Salem were tried as witches. Nineteen people and even two dogs were hanged, and another person was tortured to death. Hundreds of lives were ruined before witch fever finally subsided and people were able to return their attention to fields and families.

WHAT HAPPENED TO BETTY PARRIS AND ABIGAIL WILLIAMS?

Abigail’s story is lost to history. Betty Parris regained her health once she moved away from home to live with relatives. Her mother died in 1696, and her father was driven out of Salem Village shortly after. Betty joined her father, moving from town to town until she married a land trader when she was twenty-seven. She died a respectable New England countrywoman at the age of seventy-eight in 1760.