Lowes Halloween witch display is an impressive and captivating attraction that draws the attention of customers during the Halloween season. The display showcases an assortment of witch-themed decorations and items that are sure to enhance the spooky atmosphere of Halloween parties and events. The Lowes Halloween witch display features a wide variety of witch figurines, broomsticks, cauldrons, and other accessories that can be used to create a witch-themed display or add a touch of witchcraft to any Halloween setup. The display's attention to detail and creativity make it a popular choice for customers looking to add a spooky element to their Halloween decorations. Whether it's a large-scale extravaganza or a small display for the home, the Lowes Halloween witch display offers something for everyone. With its array of options and attention to detail, the display is the perfect place to find inspiration and ideas for creating a bewitching Halloween experience.

Possessed: The Salem witch trials

With its array of options and attention to detail, the display is the perfect place to find inspiration and ideas for creating a bewitching Halloween experience. From classic witch attire to more modern and whimsical options, the Lowes Halloween witch display has it all. Customers can explore different types of witches, from traditional green-faced witches to cute and playful ones.

On the 330th anniversary of the Salem witch trials, historian Kathleen M. Brown discusses the stories, theories, and contemporary parallels to one of America’s stranger chapters in history.

In many ways, the witch hunt fit in with New England folk beliefs and theology, says Kathleen M. Brown. The idea that the devil had a hand in human affairs and “could seduce you away from God” was a very normative belief, she says.

“It begins in the house of a minister,” says Kathleen M. Brown, the David Boies Professor of History. Samuel Parris’ 9-year-old daughter, Betty, begins to exhibit strange symptoms. The doctor watched her violent fits and suggested supernatural causes. Stranger still, the illness seemed to be contagious. Parris’ 11-year-old niece, Abigail Williams, was beset by fits, followed by two others: 12-year-old Ann Putnam and 17-year-old Elizabeth Hubbard. By March 1, 1692, three women were accused of witchcraft: Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba, an Indigenous woman from Barbados, who was enslaved by Parris. Thus began the Salem witch hunt, one of the stranger episodes in American history. By its close, 10 girls and young women claimed to be afflicted by witchcraft, resulting in the deaths of 20 people, one of whom was accidentally killed during torture.

One of the reasons that the Salem witch trials are “still very fascinating to people in the present day,” says Brown, is that 17th-century Puritan New England was a highly codified patriarchal society. “This is not a society that ordinarily provides girls and young women with speaking roles.”

The young women seem to “be on the same page for reasons that nobody really understands, even to this day,” Brown says. The young women may have dabbled in fortune telling to ease their anxieties about their marriage prospects, which determined their futures along with their financial stability. Several of the women were servants and nieces, who may have experienced heightened anxiety about dim marital prospects due to lack of money and family connections. Many of them were orphaned during skirmishes with Native Americans on Massachusetts’ northern frontier and were not only displaced but had recently experienced bloodshed, loss, and trauma, Brown says.

Violence occurring on the northern border created a sense that the colonists were losing control, Brown says. People were dying. The Puritan leadership was unable to “keep residents of the larger settler community safe from Native Americans,” who the Puritans often associated with the devil, Brown says. The leaders of the colony, all Anglo-Saxon men used to being in power, used to protecting their families, and charged with a sense of religious purpose, were feeling “that they’re impotent in the face of this challenge from Native Americans, who may be working through the power of the devil to afflict the larger colony,” Brown says.

The year 1692 was one of general unrest. “Just to make it even more complicated, part of the political conflict that’s occurring on the brink of the Salem outbreak involves a loss of autonomy in the Massachusetts Bay Colony,” says Brown. In 1689, the British crown inserts its own appointee as colonial governor, and the colony ejects the appointee on the grounds that he doesn’t represent their Puritan leadership.

Meanwhile, traditional Puritan leadership, along with the population of Puritans, “has been shrinking,” Brown says. By the “1690s, New England is a much less Puritan place than 1630s.”

While lots of explanations exist as to why something happens in 1692, “it seems that no explanation really gets at all the factors,” Brown says. “Why are young girls and young women feeling that they’re possessed by the devil and are cursed and tormented by older women and men in the community?”

The afflicted girls begin by accusing people with marginal social status, most notably Tituba, who confessed under torture. They strike out at women that represent failure in the eyes of the community, Brown says, including Sarah Good, who was reliant on charity after her father, a prosperous tavern owner, committed suicide, leaving no will.

The Puritan leadership supported the afflicted girls in these accusations. “This outbreak resulted in the executions of accused witches because local magistrates and clergymen pour gasoline on the fire,” Brown says. “The elite leadership of very learned clergymen and local magistrates of the courts were definitely on board with this.” Otherwise, the accusations would have remained just that—accusations, with local people “baking witch cakes and putting little locks of hair inside a frying pan of urine to see if somebody really was a witch or not,” Brown says. “But you wouldn’t have had people tried; you wouldn’t have the gathering of testimony; you wouldn’t have all the documentation, if all of the legal apparatus and the expertise of clergymen hadn't been brought to bear.”

As the afflicted girls grew in confidence, their accusations became more ambitious, and they targeted prosperous and established members of the community. “At the very end of the accusations, when Governor Phips of Massachusetts calls a halt to the whole thing, it’s because they’ve accused the governor’s wife,” Brown says. “They do overreach themselves.”

By October of 1692, several authorities also begin to question the veracity of spectral evidence, which had been central to witchcraft trials. “If somebody says in court, ‘I saw John Proctor and he was flying through the sky, and he flew to so-and-so’s window at night,’ this would be entered into the courtroom as spectral evidence that John Proctor is in league with the devil and is a witch,” Brown says. Questioners began to wonder, “if the devil can make somebody fly, could the devil make you think that you saw them flying?” she says.

The last of the Salem witch trials was held in May of 1693. In total, between 144 and 185 people were accused of witchcraft. Fifty-four confessed—"if you confessed, you could save your life,” Brown says. Nineteen people were executed, 14 women and five men. An 81-year-old man was accidentally killed, pressed to death by stones during torture. All the accused were pardoned by the end of 1693.

In many ways, the witch hunt fit in with New England folk beliefs and theology, says Brown. Puritans, along with many other Protestants, were strong believers in Providence, “the working out of God’s will on Earth,” she says. Providence was also the purpose behind “a test or an ordeal that it suited God to set before an entire population of people to test their spiritual mettle.”

In the 1690s, there was a general sense within the Puritan community that they were slipping away from their values, Brown says, just a razor’s edge from straying. Meanwhile, the devil lurked.

She says that the idea that the devil had a hand in human affairs and could “insinuate himself into your heart and your thinking and try to seduce you away from God,” was a very normative belief. “You can never be so certain that you’re on the right side of things” in Puritan culture, Brown says. There was a sense that it “would be very easy to slip into some kind of really harmful—in the sense of your own soul and in the sense of your larger community—relationship with Satan.” Idle hands do the devil’s work, as the saying goes.

While the Salem witch hunt happened under particular conditions at a particular time, there have been other parallels in American history. “Famously, Arthur Miller made the analogy to the McCarthy hearings,” with ‘The Crucible,’ a play based on the Salem witch trials, says Brown. “The one part of that book I think is still very powerful in the present day is the notion of the fear of something that’s beyond your knowledge and ability to control and the sense that the threat or danger is multiplying. And there’s nothing you can do about it.”

During the Red Scare, America had the notion that every secret communist was engaged in the “robust production and recruitment of new communists, that it was happening everywhere, and that, unless there was some kind of really bold intervention, the numbers of communists would grow exponentially, and the whole country would come crashing down,” Brown says. While communism and witchcraft are not similar, the mechanism whereby the accused are encouraged to accuse others in a court of law without solid evidence fuels a similar snowballing effect, she says.

“I want to be careful about drawing too-easy parallels to the present day,” Brown says, but for her a more contemporary reference was the QAnon conspiracy and the false accusations directed at Hillary Rodham Clinton and her inner circle. Brown says, “there’s no way to corroborate it, and there’s no way to completely debunk it in the minds of the accusers.”

In the end, she says, it all comes down to a question of belief.

Credits

• Kristina García Writer

The Salem Witch Trials According to the Historical Records

The Scottish Ballet performs Helen Pickett’s ballet version of The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s play based on the Salem witch trials of 1692. Miller used historical records and texts to help construct his play.

On March 23, 1692, a warrant was issued for the arrest of four-year-old Dorothy Good of Salem Village on “suspition of acts of Witchcraft.” She was taken into custody the next day and jailed with her mother, Sarah, who had been accused of the same capital crime three weeks earlier. Since witches were often shackled in jail, something like shackles must have been adapted to fit little Dorothy, the youngest person in Salem accused of practicing the devil’s magic. Over the next year, more than 150 women, men, and children from Salem Village (present-day Danvers) and neighboring communities were formally accused of practicing witchcraft. A third of those arrested confessed but were not necessarily given lighter sentences. In all, 19 were hanged, one pressed to death, and five others died in jail.

Trouble in the tiny Puritan village started in February 1692, when eleven-year-old Abigail Williams and nine-year-old Elizabeth Parris, daughter of Reverend Samuel Parris, began acting strangely. The girls complained of bites, contorted their bodies, threw things, and fell into trances. A doctor’s examination concluded they were suffering from the evil effects of witchcraft. The “afflicted” girls were asked to name names, and they did.

“If you think about what’s going on in New England—threat of attack from warring tribes, unease about a new charter—and suddenly something strange happens in your household and you’re a minister. You know a witch was arrested in Chelmsford and another up in Ipswich. You believe that the devil is against Massachusetts, and you believe the devil is against your church, and you believe the devil is against you as a Protestant Puritan minister. And it’s in your house! There were reasons why it was credible that there could be witches in Salem Village,” says historian Margo Burns, the associate editor of Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt.

Burns examines the witch trials through original-source documents in “The Capital Crime of Witchcraft: What the Primary Sources Tell Us,” a presentation sponsored by the New Hampshire Humanities Council.

Three women were taken into custody on March 1. Sarah Good, a beggar and mother, Sarah Osborne, a woman who hadn’t attended church in some time, and Tituba, Parris’s Indian slave, were all charged with witchcraft. Tituba confessed and identified more witches from Salem.

“It didn’t have to go any further than those three,” says Burns, “but they didn’t have a way to defend themselves. Just the usual suspects. All were marked for class and Tituba for race. John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin, the local magistrates, coerced a false confession out of Tituba. If it had been another time, it might just have stopped there. The next two people should not have had their cases go forward. Hathorne and Corwin could have said, ‘Okay, we don’t buy this. No, you didn’t see her, because we know this person. This is not true.’ But they held them over.”

The next two defendants were Rebecca Nurse, an ancestor of Burns, and Martha Cory, both fully covenanted church members and of high social standing. They were accused of witchcraft based on “spectral evidence,” which meant the court accepted testimony that disembodied spirits, or specters, were sent through dreams or visions by the accused with the help of Satan to harm the victims by stabbing, choking, biting, and jabbing them with pins. The accused were interrogated in public. During questioning, the purported victims exhibited dramatic reactions while townspeople watched.

“There were discussions going on between ministers,” says Burns. “It wasn’t so much whether specters existed, it was how you interpret it. The big discussion was whether the devil could impersonate somebody with or without their permission. So that was tantamount to saying Rebecca Nurse gave the devil permission to go out and afflict these girls in her image.”

In May, the new Massachusetts governor, Sir William Phips, established a special court to try the witchcraft cases, presided over by William Stoughton. “The court didn’t convene until June 2, 1692, so over half those accused, around 70, were just piling up in the jail,” says Burns.

Just as the jails were filling up with accused witches, the number of those claiming affliction also ramped up. One of the accusers listed in the court documents of Sarah Good was her daughter, Dorothy, who was coerced during an interrogation.

A number of villagers petitioned the court on Nurse’s behalf. Nurse was found not guilty, but Stoughton sent the jurors to reconsider. They changed their verdict to guilty. She was hanged on July 19, with Sarah Good and three others.

Five more were hanged in August and eight in September. In October, Increase Mather, a prominent minister in Boston, denounced the use of spectral evidence: “It were better that ten suspected witches should escape than one innocent person be condemned.” That same month, Governor Phips terminated the special court. But that wasn’t the end. Cases would continue in a regular court in January. “When pious men and women who were in good standing in their own churches were accused, there was pushback,” says Burns.

The accusations ran their course in Salem Village, but not in Andover, where 48 were accused compared with 23 in Salem Village says Burns. “A lot of people were against spectral evidence, so confessions were now the gold standard to find people guilty. The confessions that came before were from people with no agency whatsoever, like little Dorothy. But when they got to Andover, the magistrates were really good at interrogating people in private. By September, they could coerce people like clockwork. There, a lot who confessed were children as young as six.” In 1693, the new Superior Court of Judicature tried the remaining cases and eventually cleared the jails. Phips pardoned all those sentenced to be executed by Stoughton in January 1693. The cases continued to be tried until mid May, but no one else was convicted. “The grand jury couldn’t even indict Tituba,” says Burns. The colony admitted the trials were a mistake and compensated many of the families. But the damage was done, and it was devastating.

On September 13, 1710, William Good went before the court to receive restitution for the losses he endured years earlier. In his petition he wrote:

To The Honourable Committee The humble representation Will’m. Goodof the Damage
sustained by him in the year 1692. by reason
of the sufferings of his family upon the account of supposed Witchcraft

1 My wife Sarah Good was In prison about four months & then Executed.

2 a sucking child dyed in prison before the Mothers Execution.

3 a child of 4 or 5 years old was in prison 7 or 8 months and being chain’d in the dungeon was so hardly used and terrifyed that she hath ever since been very chargeable haveing little or no reason to govern herself. And I leave it unto the Honourable Court to Judge what damage I have sustained by such a destruction of my poor family. And so rest Your Honours humble servant
*William Good Salem.

The 3 Biggest Myths About the Salem Witch Trials

In this 1869 oil painting 'Witch Hill (The Salem Martyr)' by Thomas Satterwhite Noble, the young woman posing as a condemned witch was a descendent of one of the hanged victims.

Salem is having a moment. This past July, Massachusetts passed a lot that officially exonerated Elizabeth Johnson, Jr., the last person accused of being a witch. On Oct. 7, an exhibit opened at the New-York Historical Society—offering details on the real history of the Salem witch trials.

And then, of course, there’s Hocus Pocus 2. The sequel to the 1993 cult classic was Disney+’s biggest film premiere yet when it came out on Sep. 30. For the uninitiated, it features Bette Midler, Kathy Najimy, and Sarah Jessica Parker reprising their roles as 17th-century witches who find themselves in modern-day Salem.

All of this speaks to a broader public fascination with the Salem witch trials. According to Emerson Baker, author of A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience, 156 people were formally charged with witchcraft—mostly women. Between June and September 1692, 19 people were hanged to death for the crime, and one was pressed to death by a rock. Five more died in prison between May 1692 and May 1693. Additionally, at least 120 were imprisoned for a year or more.

Joseph Glanvill's 1700 wordcuts 'Saducismus Triumphatus' aim to depict a rebuttal to any skepticism about the existence of witchcraft.

More from TIME

But this history is often misunderstood, much like the women who were accused of being witches were misunderstood. While people are not being put on trial for being witches in 2022, Baker sees the shadows of witch hunts in some of our modern-day paranoia—“Salem moments,” as he calls them. “Extremism, scapegoating, racism, hatred, bigotry—as long as we have that, we’re going to have some version of witch hunts,” he says.

Below, Baker outlines three of the biggest myths about the Salem witch trials.

The display also offers a variety of Halloween-themed props and accessories, such as spellbooks, potion bottles, and black cats, to complete the enchanting ambiance. In addition to its impressive selection, the Lowes Halloween witch display provides a fun and immersive shopping experience. It invites customers to step into a world of witches and magic, where they can envision their own Halloween transformation. The display is strategically designed to captivate customers and spark their imagination, encouraging them to explore and interact with the various witch-themed items. The Lowes Halloween witch display not only offers a wide array of options for Halloween enthusiasts but also creates an exciting and memorable shopping experience. Whether customers are looking for a centerpiece for their Halloween party or simply want to add a spooky touch to their home, the Lowes Halloween witch display is sure to inspire creativity and make Halloween decorating a breeze..

Reviews for "Enter a world of enchantment at Lowes' Halloween witch display"

1. John - 1 star - I was extremely disappointed with Lowes Halloween witch display. The witches looked cheaply made and lacked creativity. They were just flimsy plastic dolls with tacky costumes. The whole display seemed like an afterthought, with no attention to detail or originality. I expected more from a major home improvement store like Lowes. Save your time and money and go somewhere else for your Halloween decorations.

2. Sarah - 2 stars - I was not impressed with the Lowes Halloween witch display. The witches looked generic and uninteresting. There was nothing unique or captivating about them. Additionally, the overall display lacked any sort of ambiance or atmosphere. It felt like they just threw some witches together without much thought or effort. I would recommend exploring other options for your Halloween decorations.

3. Mike - 2 stars - I was underwhelmed by the Lowes Halloween witch display. The witches looked more like dolls for children rather than spooky Halloween decorations. They lacked any real scare factor or creativity. The whole display seemed like an afterthought and lacked the attention to detail that I expect from a store like Lowes. I would not recommend this display if you're looking for impressive Halloween decorations.

Experience the thrills and chills of Lowes' witch display