Halloween, also known as All Hallows' Eve, is a holiday celebrated on the evening of October 31st. It is a time when people dress up in costumes, go trick-or-treating, and indulge in all things spooky and supernatural. One popular figure associated with Halloween is the witch. Witches have long been depicted in folklore and popular culture as practitioners of magic and witchcraft. They are often portrayed as women with mystical powers, wielding broomsticks and casting spells. In many Halloween traditions, the witch is a central figure, often seen flying on her broom or stirring a cauldron.

Hundreds of Salem witch trials documents get new home

In this image provided by the Peabody Essex Museum, Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, PEM’s Rose-Marie and Eijk van Otterloo Executive Director and CEO, left, and Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court Chief Justice Kimberly S. Budd pose with Salem Witch Trial documents from 1692 at the Massachusetts Archives in Boston. Hundreds of court documents from Salem Witch Trials are being transferred from the museum, where they have been stored for more than four decades, to the newly expanded Judicial Archives facility. (Peabody Essex Museum/Kathy Tarantola via AP)

BOSTON (AP) — Hundreds of court documents from the 1692 Salem witch trials are being transferred from the Salem museum where they have been stored for more than four decades to the newly expanded Judicial Archives facility in Boston.

The 527 documents — which include transcripts of testimony and examinations, depositions, warrants for apprehension and other legal papers — were moved to the Peabody Essex Museum in 1980 for safekeeping, officials said Thursday.

Although the museum had acquired some documents on its own, most had been stored at the clerk’s office at Essex County Superior Court, the museum said.

To properly preserve them, the documents need to be stored under the proper environmental conditions, including at or below 70 degrees Fahrenheit (21 degrees Celsius), at 50% relative humidity, and in low-light conditions, Dan Lipcan, director of the museum’s Phillips Library in Rowley, said in a statement. They are also kept in acid-free folders and boxes and in fireproof cabinets.

“We are grateful to PEM for its capable stewardship of these invaluable documents and gratified that the state can now welcome the Salem witch trials documents home to the Judicial Archives,” Supreme Judicial Court Chief Justice Kimberly Budd said in a statement. “The court deeply appreciates the extraordinary public service that the museum has provided in caring for this unique collection for more than 40 years.”

The SJC, the state’s highest court, traces its origins to the witch trials. Originally the Superior Court of Judicature, created in November 1692, one of its first tasks was hearing the cases of 26 people accused of witchcraft. Twenty-three were found not guilty, and the other three were later pardoned, according to the court’s history.

The witch trials were fomented by superstition and fear of disease, outsiders and Native Americans, and were stoked by petty jealousies and personal vendettas involving several families. Of the 20 people convicted of witchcraft and subsequently put to death, 19 were hanged and one was crushed to death by rocks.

The story and tragedy of the trials resonates to this day.

The study of the original documents humanizes the victims and helps creates a better understanding of their experiences, PEM Executive Director and CEO Lynda Roscoe Hartigan said in a statement.

“PEM is committed to telling the story of these events through exhibitions, lectures and public programs as well as by making reproductions of the Salem witch trial documents available to the public on our website,” she said.

The Salem Witch Trials

Sources Charges. In 1692 some teenage girls in Salem, Massachusetts, accused a West Indian slave named Tituba and two white women of practicing witchcraft. The girls behaved strangely and were subject to bodily fits. Most Puritans believed in witchcraft, and witches had been prosecuted in Massachusetts several times in the preceding decades. By April the girls began to denounce others as witches, including a former minister. Hysteria. The events that followed are notorious in American history. A special court was convened in which the judges were not trained in the law and in which the accused had no attorneys. The court violated precedent by agreeing to consider “ spectral evidence ” — testimony by an accuser that claimed that a specter (spirit) resembling the accused person was the source of the accuser ’ s misery. Such a specter could only be seen, it was believed, by the victim, so the evidence could neither be refuted nor corroborated and for that reason had not been admitted in the past. The trials that followed resulted in hundreds of accusations, over one hundred guilty verdicts, and the executions of twenty persons, mostly women. Nineteen who refused to confess were hanged, and one man was pressed to death with stones for refusing to answer the charge, thereby saving his family ’ s fortune. By early 1693 several ministers had expressed grave doubts about spectral evidence, and the governor pardoned those condemned and eventually suspended all the trials. Causes. Even though the hysteria was not limited to Salem, a close analysis of the community reveals some patterns concerning witchcraft accusations throughout New England. Most of the accusers came from the more rural Salem Village, with a third of the accusations originating with members of the Putnam family. The accused generally were prosperous and from the commercially oriented Salem Town. Most of the young girls who made the accusations had lost a parent in Indian raids and now worked around Salem as servants, while most of the accused were prosperous, older women without husbands or sons. Puritan Mission. More broadly, the witchcraft hysteria of 1692 reflected deep anxieties among Puritans that the idealized, pious way of life they had created was ending. They had lost their charter in the 1680s, and under the new charter of 1691 the male members of the Puritan (Congregationalist) churches had to share the vote and office-holding with Anglicans. The tight-knit religious communities of their founders were giving way to more business-oriented and competitive towns. These changes, coupled with their sincere belief in a spiritual world in which good and evil fought for the souls of humans, made it easy to believe that there were witches among them causing all sorts of problems. Even so, the simple legal error of admitting spectral evidence turned what would have been isolated, ugly episodes into a yearlong horror for Massachusetts.

In many Halloween traditions, the witch is a central figure, often seen flying on her broom or stirring a cauldron. Magic, both in the form of tricks and illusions, is another integral part of Halloween. Magicians and illusionists often perform during Halloween parties and events, dazzling audiences with their sleight of hand and mind-bending tricks.

Sources

Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, Salem Possessed: The Social Origins of Witchcraft (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974); Carol F. Karlen, The Devil in the Shape of a Woman: Witchcraft in Colonial New England (New York: Random House, 1987).

Citation styles

Encyclopedia.com gives you the ability to cite reference entries and articles according to common styles from the Modern Language Association (MLA), The Chicago Manual of Style, and the American Psychological Association (APA).

Within the “Cite this article” tool, pick a style to see how all available information looks when formatted according to that style. Then, copy and paste the text into your bibliography or works cited list.

Because each style has its own formatting nuances that evolve over time and not all information is available for every reference entry or article, Encyclopedia.com cannot guarantee each citation it generates. Therefore, it’s best to use Encyclopedia.com citations as a starting point before checking the style against your school or publication’s requirements and the most-recent information available at these sites:

Modern Language Association

The Chicago Manual of Style

American Psychological Association

Notes:

• Most online reference entries and articles do not have page numbers. Therefore, that information is unavailable for most Encyclopedia.com content. However, the date of retrieval is often important. Refer to each style’s convention regarding the best way to format page numbers and retrieval dates.
• In addition to the MLA, Chicago, and APA styles, your school, university, publication, or institution may have its own requirements for citations. Therefore, be sure to refer to those guidelines when editing your bibliography or works cited list.

When Were the Salem Witch Trials?

Today’s Wonder of the Day was inspired by JoAnn from Lexington, SC. JoAnn Wonders, “What were the Salem Witch Trials?” Thanks for WONDERing with us, JoAnn!

It's Halloween night and your doorbell chimes over and over again, as a steady procession of goblins, ghouls, and ghosts appear on the porch in search of sweet treats. Then you hear a light knocking at the door. You answer and a small child asks you to guess what she is.

She's dressed all in black with a pointy hat and a broomstick. What could she be? It doesn't take long for you to figure out that black clothing plus a pointy hat and a broomstick can equal only one thing: a witch!

According to most dictionaries, witches are people (usually women) who claim to or are thought to practice magic or sorcery. Unlike magicians, however, witches are believed to possess evil or wicked powers due to their association with the devil or other forces of evil.

Do witches really exist? The vast majority of people today no longer believe in witchcraft or witches. However, hundreds of years ago, people did believe in witches, and their belief led to the tragic events that have come to be known as the Salem witch trials.

In January 1692, two young girls living in Salem Village (now Danvers, Massachusetts) began experiencing bouts of violent convulsions and screaming. The girls, Elizabeth Parris and Abigail Williams, were the daughter and niece of Samuel Parris, the local Puritan minister.

Local doctor William Griggs diagnosed the girls and concluded that they had been bewitched. The girls claimed that their Caribbean slave, Tituba, and two other women from town, Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne, had bewitched them.

These women were arrested and accused of witchcraft, creating the beginnings of a panic in the small village and surrounding areas. Tensions were already high in Salem Village due to a recent smallpox epidemic and ongoing fears of attacks from Native Americans.

Accusations of witchcraft fueled residents' fears and suspicions . Soon, several other girls began to exhibit similar symptoms.

Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne denied being witches, but Tituba confessed and named others who were supposedly witches. Historians now believe she likely did this in an attempt to save herself from what was likely to be a certain conviction .

Hysteria spread beyond Salem Village into the rest of Massachusetts, as many others were accused of witchcraft. In total, more than 150 men, women, and children were accused of witchcraft. Some of the accused were upstanding members of the local church and community. At times it likely seemed that no one was safe from accusation.

The local justice system was quickly overwhelmed by claims of witchcraft. In May 1692, Governor William Phips established a special Court of Oyer and Terminer to hear and decide witchcraft cases.

The court handed down its first conviction against Bridget Bishop on June 2, 1692. Bishop was hanged eight days later on what would become known as Gallows Hill. Over the next few months, 18 more people would be hanged on Gallows Hill, while several other accused witches died in jail.

By September 1692, public opinion began to turn against the trials and the hysteria subsided . The special Court of Oyer and Terminer was disbanded and all those accused of witchcraft were eventually released and pardoned .

The Salem witch trials left a painful legacy of bitterness in Salem Village and throughout Massachusetts. One positive outcome was the revision of court procedures and the laws of evidence.

The Court of Oyer and Terminer had based many convictions on spectral evidence (testimony about dreams and visions). Governor Phips later demanded that spectral evidence be disregarded and that standards of evidence be similar for all crimes.

Wonder Contributors

We’d like to thank:

Jonathan from NJ, Isaac , and Bella
for contributing questions about today’s Wonder topic!

Keep WONDERing with us!

The mystery and intrigue surrounding magic add to the enchanting atmosphere of Halloween. The concept of a magic wand is closely associated with witches and wizards. In folklore and fiction, a magic wand represents the source of a witch's power, often used to cast spells or enchant objects. The idea of a magic wand has become a popular symbol of magic and witchcraft, and it is often depicted as a long, slender object, typically made of wood or metal. However, it's important to remember that Halloween and the portrayal of witches and magic are primarily for entertainment purposes. The real-world practice of witchcraft and magic is diverse and varies greatly among different cultures and traditions. In conclusion, Halloween is a time when the themes of witches, magic, and the supernatural take center stage. It is a holiday that embraces the mystical and the mysterious, allowing people to indulge in their fascination with the unknown. Whether it's through costumes, decorations, or storytelling, Halloween provides a platform for the celebration of all things witchy and magical..

Reviews for "The Power of the Familiar: Black Cats and Halloween Witchcraft"

1. Sarah - 2/5 - I was really disappointed with "Halloween with Magic Dong". The storyline felt convoluted and confusing, making it difficult for me to follow along. The acting was also subpar, making it hard for me to connect with any of the characters. Additionally, I found the humor to be crude and tasteless, which was a major letdown. Overall, I did not find this movie enjoyable and would not recommend it to others.

2. John - 1/5 - "Halloween with Magic Dong" was a complete waste of my time. The plot was nonsensical, and the dialogue was cringeworthy. I found myself checking the time constantly, hoping for it to be over soon. The title itself is misleading and has little relevance to the actual content of the movie. Save yourself the trouble and skip this one.

3. Lisa - 2/5 - I had high hopes for "Halloween with Magic Dong" given the intriguing title, but unfortunately, it failed to deliver. The pacing was extremely slow, and the characters lacked depth or any real development. The special effects were also below par and took away from the overall viewing experience. It seemed like the film was trying too hard to be edgy and shocking, but it just came off as forced and unoriginal. I wanted to like it, but it fell short of my expectations.

Witchy Women: Famous Halloween Witches in Pop Culture