Original subtitles

For centuries, witch hunts raged through Europe

and the Americas.

Everybody believed in the existence of witches.

The trials catch fire.

...causing the deaths of tens of thousands

of innocent people.

It was extraordinary.

♪ ♪

To this day, the most infamous hunt of all

ravaged a small religious community

in colonial Massachusetts.

Salem was a community that was already

riven with hostility to one's neighbors.

♪ ♪

The horrors begin when children in the minister's

house have violent fits, an affliction that seems

to be caused by the devil.

Triggering a savage, unstoppable panic that saw hundreds

accused of witchcraft by their neighbors, friends, and family.

This great network of witches all working

together across the area.

They know at the end of this that they could

be judged guilty of witchcraft, and they'll be hanged.

Once you've crossed that line, you

have actually executed someone, it's very difficult to stop.

It could never go back to the way it was.

This was a war zone.

This is the story of the Salem Witch Trials.

♪ ♪

Salem is a Puritan community.

-The Puritans were a dissenting branch of the Anglican Church

who fled England in the early 1600s.

-They were concerned that living in England,

the hierarchy of the Church of England, the Anglican Church,

was telling them what to do, was making them believe things

that they didn't actually want to believe.

So off they go to America to found their own church

and to own their own doctrine.

As the Puritan population increased

over the coming decades, they established multiple colonies

in what would become the Northeast of the United States.

Really, the locus of Puritan influence

and the locus of the congregational church

was in Massachusetts, was in places like Boston and Salem.

The community at Salem is a congregation-less

community, which means that the people there

have a belief that the congregation itself should

be able to shape how the church works.

Puritans in Salem Village have the power

to elect a new minister to lead their congregation.

They nominate the recently ordained Samuel Parris.

Samuel Parris arrived in Salem Village

in 1689.

He's come to Salem from Barbados.

He has had a bit of a career as a merchant before then.

He's not actually very successful.

He comes to New England to try his luck at something new,

at something different in this new colony that's just sort

of building itself up in the 17th century.

He sails first to Boston, where he

lives for a couple of years with his family,

and then to Salem Village.

Salem Village is a kind of

an appendage to Salem Town.

Salem Town is the much more prosperous community.

Salem Village was fractious.

This was not considered a destination

for an ambitious minister like Parris.

He enters into the community, and he

starts sifting out the most godly people around him

to join his sort of special congregation

of particularly pious villagers.

I think he's quite an embittered individual,

and I think he tends to take that frustration out

through very, very sort of impassioned preaching.

Because he's a new minister, he's

very keen to prove his place in the village and his utility

to the local community.

Parris has overseen the church in Salem

for two difficult years.

When this highly religious community

is thrown into disarray, young girls in nearby villages

have been experimenting with magic.

They had been doing something known

as the egg and glass.

The idea was that you would take an egg,

and you would then drip the white of the egg

into a bowl of water and look at the shapes it makes.

You were asking God to give you some insight into what

shape your future would take.

What starts off as playing around with

fortune telling becomes more sinister.

What they saw in the water was the shape of a coffin.

They start feeling very worried.

This kind of divination was regarded

as demonic.

It's impossible to know if Samuel Parris's

daughter, Betty, and niece Abigail

took part in these rituals.

But something terrible happens shortly afterwards.

Betty Parris starts showing strange symptoms

of affliction.

This then spreads to Abigail.

They start saying that their muscles hurt,

and they start screaming.

You can imagine how distressing that would

have been for their family.

This upheaval is coming from right inside the

house of the minister.

The Reverend Samuel Parris

calls in the doctor.

He says, it is supernatural.

I can't cure it, so it must be witchcraft.

The people of Salem, they're very religious.

They believe in God.

But that means they believe in the devil, too.

They're kind of on the lookout for witchcraft.

There had certainly been plenty of cases

in Europe involving

what was known as bewitchment.

What was happening to Betty and Abigail

seemed to follow this recognized model.

There was an established precedent

for blaming this on witches.

When the community has

decided to accept the idea

that these girls are being attacked by witches,

the next stage in the process is then saying,

who is it who is doing this to you?

Who is afflicting you?

The names that come up are two

women of middling age

who were unpopular within their community,

Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne.

The other name we have is Tituba.

Tituba was a servant in the house of Samuel Paris.

I think her name was probably originally

something like Tata Bay.

She comes from a grouping on the South American mainland

called the Tetebetana.

-There was that ethnic difference compared

to the people surrounding her.

And it's kind of that classic idea

of assuming that people who are different

are more likely to be in league with things

that are deemed evil and unfamiliar to you.

Abigail and Betty might have picked on

Tituba as well because Betty's father Samuel may

have been critical of a woman of color

who lived in his community.

I can imagine him bullying Tituba.

I can imagine him speaking critically about her,

maybe thinking she wasn't a good enough Christian.

So it's really no surprise to Samuel

when Abigail and Betty start pointing the finger at Tituba

and saying that she's a witch.

♪ ♪

The affliction starts spreading from Abigail and Betty

to their friends, the Putnam family.

They start exhibiting the same symptoms.

They start screaming in the night.

They start convulsing.

They start pointing the finger and saying that they, too,

are bewitched by the people that

Abigail and Betty have suspected.

♪ ♪

First of March, 1692, the accused

are dragged in front of magistrates.

A confession is needed before they're sent to trial.

For all the women, it's a terrifying ordeal,

especially Tituba, the woman of indigenous or African heritage.

Tituba begins by

denying that she did anything at all.

She's in front of these powerful white men.

She's probably been hurt, and she's certainly been

enslaved by powerful white men.

This is a very bullying power relationship

that she's in in this room.

These women were looking for ways

to try and save themselves.

Therefore, they might come to say the things

that people wanted to hear, confess to imaginary crimes.

♪ ♪

In the end, during her questioning,

Tituba starts to say, I did hurt the children.

She said, the devil came to me, and the devil kept saying to me,

you must hurt the children.

You must hurt the children.

He threatened me, she said.

He said he would kill me.

He would tear me to pieces.

He would cut my head off.

With Tituba's confession secured,

the magistrates also questioned the other two women accused

of being witches, Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne.

As part of this questioning, Sarah Good's young

daughter, Dorothy, was asked about whether her mother

was, in fact, a witch.

She was only four.

What was she expected to say?

And of course, she says, yes, my mother is a witch.

And she admits witchcraft herself,

which is particularly shocking.

♪ ♪

The people of Salem send the suspects off

to Boston, the capital of the colony of Massachusetts,

to await trial.

They're kept in chains.

There are women.

There are some children, like Dorothy Good.

There are people who are absolutely desperate.

Although the accused women have been jailed,

it will be many months until a trial can proceed.

The colony of Massachusetts, it's

governed under a charter from the British government.

And the charter has expired.

The governor and many of the leading men of the colony

have gone off to England to secure a new charter

to make sure that its legal processes can

continue to function.

♪ ♪

Although the Salem town magistrates

can question suspects, they can't really

start any trials until the governor arrives from England.

It gives more space and time for the afflictions to spread

and the concern of the community to grow.

During that time,

questions keep on being asked.

A lot of other names start getting mentioned.

And these women who are sitting around in these jail cells

happen to keep remembering other people who

might have been involved.

Things start to spiral.

♪ ♪

Months pass.

The people of Salem village grow ever more convinced

that witches walk amongst them.

Further accusations are coming from the

supposedly afflicted girls.

Samuel Powers is preaching about

witchcraft to the congregation.

And the contagion seems to be continuing.

There are stories of more girls getting afflicted.

The suspects also carry on being questioned.

And they carry on telling stories about the witchcraft

that they've supposedly committed.

They name new suspects back in Salem village,

people like Bridget Bishop.

And then these people are brought in for questioning, too.

♪ ♪

Most news is spread by word of mouth.

People communicated at the marketplace

when they were trading.

♪ ♪

About 75% of those who are accused

are female.

And that's because women are seen as particularly

prone to becoming witches.

They're seen as gateways of the devil.

They're seen as people who might fall prey

to these sort of demonic lies.

♪ ♪

Samuel Powers also asked the previous minister of Salem,

Diodat Lawson, to come and visit and see what

he thinks of the situation.

And then he goes to the Powers household.

And he sees Betty Powers in one of her fits.

She's running around the room screaming.

She's trying to climb out of the window and fly.

And he writes an account of what he saw

and what he experienced while he was in Salem Village.

As a minister and trusted member of society,

Lawson's vivid account adds credibility to the witch hunt.

The first accused witches were the outsiders.

They were those you might consider

the usual suspects in witchcraft.

But as the accusations grow, more and more prominent people

are actually drawn into this net.

The sorts of people who would not

expect to be giving themselves up to the devil.

They're not people who might be seen as

outsiders or scapegoats like the Native American

Tituba or the homeless person Sarah Good.

These are prime, upstanding members of Samuel Powers's

congregation, people like Rebecca Nurse,

who's been a member of the church all her life

and is seen by her neighbors as being a pious and good person.

She's a pillar of the godly community.

You would expect her to be protected from accusation.

But nevertheless, she's named as a witch.

As the accusations spread, they dig deeper and deeper

into Salem's community.

We have to begin from the important fact

that everybody believed in the existence of witches.

And so as these rumors begin spreading,

there's a sense of crisis.

There's a sense that Satan is actually successfully waging

this war on their community.

Salem was a community

that was already riven with division.

You've got the tension

between Salem Village and Salem Town.

Salem Village is more backward looking,

much poorer than Salem Town.

Salem Town is wealthier.

It's fancier.

It's becoming more interested in the refinements of society,

the kind of things that Puritans disapprove

of very strongly indeed.

And then you've got Paris.

Rather than smoothing things over and calming things down,

he really intensifies the factions and the resentments.

And I think the fact that the afflictions of the children

start in his household suggests that he very much is

at the center of a lot of this concern.

Within Salem Village, there is a division

between two of the prominent families.

And those are the Putnams and the Porters.

The Porter households and their allies

were much more politically linked to Salem Town,

whereas the Putnams are inward looking,

much more linked to Paris as the Salem Village minister,

much more older fashioned in their emphasis

on Puritan godliness.

The accused witches tended to come from the Porter network,

whereas the afflicted tended to be much more closely linked

to the Paris Putnam faction.

-The villagers are turning on each other.

But beyond the village, there are even worse threats.

There are Native American peoples

who the villagers have taken their land, essentially,

and they've dispossessed them.

There's also famine, because they don't know

which kind of crops to grow.

The Native Americans aren't helping them anymore,

naturally enough.

There's disease.

There are wars to the north in Maine.

And some of the people who are doing the accusing in Salem

Village are probably refugees from the war.

We're dealing with people who are really traumatized.

♪ ♪

-All of these factors are then feeding into the division

at Salem and perpetuating this mood of suspicion,

potentially of hostility to one's neighbors.

Between January and May, we end up

with 81 people accused of witchcraft, 49 of whom

are imprisoned.

♪ ♪

-This is developing into a massive social, cultural,

political crisis.

Several months after the first accusations,

Governor Phipps arrives with the new Massachusetts

charter in hand.

He now has the power to open the courts.

And the accused will either find justice and freedom

or a brutal death.

♪ ♪

When the governor arrives back from

England with the new charter, he has a range of pressing matters

to deal with.

There are Native American wars going on to the north.

There are wars between the English and the French.

And he has to go in person to intervene.

So, he's not present in the colony of Massachusetts

for quite some time after his arrival.

However, he's briefed about the people awaiting trial

for witchcraft in Boston jail.

And on May the 27th, he sets up a special court

to deal with them, a court of our own termina, which

means to hear and determine.

Which is basically an old English method

for dealing with a legal emergency.

It's a bit of a challenge in the Middle Ages

for things like popular rebellion,

when you've suddenly got a really unusual number of trials

that you need to get through.

♪ ♪

The trials are held in the meeting house,

so essentially the community's own church.

It's a packed room.

It's a hot room.

It's a noisy room. It's crowded.

It must have felt incredibly intimidating.

This is a spectacle that

a lot of villagers, some of whom

are accused, are coming to watch.

Governor Phipps won't lead the court himself.

He won't be the judge.

He asks his friends, the intellectuals,

the important men in the community, to help him.

There's also a lot of potential for the

judge to steer things in the way that he wants.

♪ ♪

As the court assembles in Salem town,

the accused witches are led from jail,

desperately hoping they will find mercy.

The accused people have to

defend themselves. They don't have lawyers.

They would have been reliant on their

own words, their own denials.

♪ ♪

You get this very, very dramatic, peculiar situation

where the afflicted girls, including Betty Parris

and Abigail Williams, are brought into the courtroom

♪ ♪

They might writhe or whimper or babble.

They actually throw fits

in front of the court.

They make new accusations.

They say things like, she's attacking me.

She's screaming at me.

She's hitting me.

If the accused witch in the dock

raises an arm, the afflicted individuals would react to that.

It's quite hard for us to imagine how sensational that

would have been and how much their performance kind

of convinces people that they're being attacked by witches.

The suspects must have been frightened.

They must have been terribly upset

by this public humiliation.

It must have been an awful, traumatic experience for them.

They know at the end of this that they could be judged

guilty of witchcraft, and that they'll be hanged.

Your options when it came to defending

yourself against a witchcraft charge were pretty limited.

But there was an idea that those who confessed to the crime

had at least shown some kind of repentance,

some kind of remorse.

If you confessed, you lost your reputation.

Not only had you told a lie before God,

but all your neighbors would then

judge you to be a witch.

You'd be permanently tainted.

But also, the people who confess will be spared.

They will be judged guilty, but they won't be executed.

And of course, it's a massive inducement to confess.

The judges don't seem to have spotted that one.

But it's something that really makes the trials catch fire.

Tituba, the first person accused of witchcraft

by the Paris family, finally takes the stand.

♪ ♪

Tituba did admit that she was a witch,

whether she believed herself to be one or not.

When she introduced this idea that there

might be this great network of witches all working together

across the area.

♪ ♪

And she was spared.

Therefore, she was not to be executed.

She was returned to jail.

Of course, that was a punishment in itself.

But it did save her life.

♪ ♪

Those who confessed to the

crime might well have helped

out the authorities by giving details about what

happened, naming other names.

As one person after another confesses and is

spared, the number of witchcraft suspects and convicted witches

starts to grow again.

♪ ♪

As well as sparing confessing suspects,

the court also makes another fatal decision,

which is to admit what's called spectral evidence.

♪ ♪

And this is essentially evidence based

on the visions of the accusers.

Spectral evidence draws on this idea

that the devil has the power to cause hallucinations

in people's minds.

Spectral evidence was basically evidence

that wasn't visible to most of the townspeople

but was, in fact, visible to the accusers.

♪ ♪

Sometimes these spirits admitted their culpability

to earlier crimes.

Sometimes other spirits accused the supposed witch

of a particular crime.

This now is an absolute nightmare when it

comes to evidential standards, because what you have here

is a form of evidence that is basically

impossible to disprove.

♪ ♪

So spectral evidence allows the trials to escalate,

allows them to move further into the realm of fantasy

and away from anything we would consider valid proof.

♪ ♪

Other members of the community are essentially

allowing this to happen by not protesting loudly against it.

There are cases of brave individuals

who'd fight to defend their loved ones,

but it was potentially a pretty dangerous business.

♪ ♪

Trials are doing very, very quick

by comparison with today.

It can be as little as 15 minutes

to determine whether somebody lives or dies.

On the 2nd of June, the court of Oyer and

Terminer renders their first verdict.

♪ ♪

It's Bridget Bishop,

and she's sentenced to be hanged.

♪ ♪

On the 2nd of June, the court makes its first

conviction of Bridget Bishop.

♪ ♪

She says not guilty in court.

She's condemned to die, but she maintains her innocence

to the gallows, and that's quite disturbing for people.

♪ ♪

Having an execution of someone for witchcraft

is dramatic enough, but she's not

going to the gallows as a kind of a penitent sinner

admitting her guilt.

She's actually saying, you guys got it wrong.

♪ ♪

The same day, one of the judges actually

resigns from the court.

So there are already some signs

that things aren't going well.

Now an actual execution has happened.

Things have got serious.

People are getting murdered because of these accusations.

♪ ♪

On the 29th of June, one of

the original suspects, Sarah Good,

is arraigned and formally charged,

and she's charged alongside four other women...

Rebecca Nurse, Susanna Martin, Elizabeth Howe, and Sarah Wild.

♪ ♪

At that trial, all five of the women

are found guilty and they're sentenced to death.

♪ ♪

The five women are executed on the 19th of July.

Sarah Good turns on the crowd and the ministers

and the judges, and she says to them,

I'm no more a witch than you are a wizard,

because she is an innocent woman about to be hanged.

God will give you blood to drink.

And that sounds very much like a curse.

But at the same time, it also feels like a bit of a prophecy

that this is all going to come to a very bad end indeed.

♪ ♪

There's also growing doubts over what's

going on now that it's proving just so serious.

♪ ♪

A number of ministers are asked for their

opinion of the trials, and in particular, the way

that spectral evidence is being used.

Some people are concerned that the accused people might

actually be making up evidence of seeing the specters

of the accused witches.

♪ ♪

And they want people like Cotton Mather, who

is a university intellectual and somebody

with wide experience in the field of judging the demonic.

Cotton Mather was regarded as one of the foremost

authorities on witches.

He wrote widely on the subject, and he wrote widely

from a position of real authority

as being one of the senior ministers in Massachusetts

at the time.

♪ ♪

So Cotton Mather and a number of other

ministers write a letter to the court

in which they sum up their opinion

on this type of evidence.

It is, however, a very equivocal letter.

They say on the one hand that there

are some doubts about this kind of evidence

and that exquisite caution, as they put it,

should be used in judging the accused people.

But at the same time, they give the court a pat on the head

and they say, well, you should just continue

doing what you're doing.

Because of course, the ministers do

believe that there are witches in the Salem community.

♪ ♪

Very important that

a group of men of Puritan ministers

with such influence in the colony say, be careful.

But then they're also saying, but it's a

jolly good thing to hunt witches.

So it's a very, very difficult situation for the authorities.

♪ ♪

Meanwhile, some people are asking questions

about why the accusers are making

the accusations that they are.

Perhaps things have gone out of hand and gone too far.

♪ ♪

That's part of this beginning of perhaps doubt

about the validity of the testimony

and the validity of the spectral evidence.

♪ ♪

Yet even though there are doubts about the

process of the convictions, on August the 19th,

a further five people are hanged.

And one of them is even a former minister, George Burrows.

He's Samuel Paris' predecessor.

♪ ♪

Burrows is being accused partly because he's

drifted from the position that Samuel Paris feels

the church should be occupying.

George gives supposedly

this quite impassioned speech

where he talks about what's happened,

closes it with a perfect recitation

of the Lord's Prayer.

♪ ♪

This was an old stereotype about witches

that they couldn't get through the Lord's Prayer

without at some point tripping up.

♪ ♪

George recites it perfectly.

And this also may have generated some doubts

in the minds of the onlookers.

♪ ♪

The crowd start to murmur.

And they move towards almost a riot.

And they say the execution should be stopped.

But who should come along but Cotton Mayer,

who has come to the executions to watch justice being done.

♪ ♪

He gives almost a sermon to the crowd in which he says

that these people are indeed witches

and that there's nothing wrong here.

The execution should continue.

And of course, because he's a minister,

he's a powerful, important figure in the community,

the crowd accept his authority.

The executions proceed, and the five people are killed.

♪ ♪

The bodies aren't even buried properly.

They're thrown into a nearby crevice in the rock

and partially covered by earth.

♪ ♪

As doubts about the witch trials grow,

some villagers courageously decide to take a stand.

But the repercussions of their actions will prove deadly.

♪ ♪

On the 18th of September, 1692,

one of the witchcraft suspects,

Giles Corey, refuses to plead at his trial.

And the courts at this time had a slightly

strange idea that if people refused to enter a plea,

you could subject them to torment to compel them to do so.

And this is what happens to Giles Corey.

♪ ♪

It's an act of defiance to not submit a plea

and allow yourself to be subjected to torture.

♪ ♪

And it may be that he would have imagined that he was going

to be found guilty either way, that the outcome was inevitable

and that he had no control over it.

-The 18th to the 19th of September, 1692,

he has heavy weights piled on top of him.

♪ ♪

That would have been like a suffocation.

It's like a slow death.

♪ ♪

When they ask him, what do you want to say to

the court, he says, more weight.

He had nothing to lose.

He's going to die anyway.

But he can die with his own dignity,

and he can die with his own sense of innocence.

♪ ♪

But one effect of him dying without entering a

plea is that his estate remained his own property

and passed to his descendants, to his son-in-laws.

If he had died having been convicted of witchcraft,

his estate would become the property of the authorities.

♪ ♪

Without a plea, trial, or conviction,

the execution of Giles Corey is unlawful.

His death sends shockwaves through the community.

Days later, his wife, Martha Corey,

is also executed, sent to the gallows, guilty of witchcraft.

♪ ♪

It's an absolute disaster

for the community of Massachusetts,

and it will leave a terrible legacy.

♪ ♪

It's been seven months now.

We've had 185 people accused.

59 have gone to trial.

19 were hanged.

Others died in prison.

This then takes on a life of its own, spreads geographically.

Across communities

like Beverly, Molden, Gloucester, Andover,

Ipswich, Marblehead, Charlestown, and Boston itself,

people are being accused of witchcraft.

♪ ♪

The witch hunts spread across New England.

They continue to attract the attention of religious experts.

Including a clergyman and scholar from Boston,

Increase Mather, whose son, Cotton Mather,

is already deeply involved with the trials in Salem Village.

♪ ♪

Increase Mather writes a letter to express some

of his doubts, to say that maybe some of the evidence,

maybe some of the accusations, don't carry the water

that we once thought they did.

After all, spectral evidence is a pretty slim reed

to hang people on.

Increase really begins to call on the

governor, Phipps, to come and sort stuff out.

♪ ♪

Phipps and Increase Mather go back a long way.

They came together on the ship from England

with the new charter.

William Phipps really respects Increase Mather.

And what he sees in Increase's letter really concerns him.

♪ ♪

There's also a rumor going around the colony

that somebody has named Mary Phipps, governor's wife,

as a witch.

♪ ♪

And it would make sense, from Satan's perspective,

not to limit himself to the older, less affluent women

that were so often associated with witchcraft.

If Satan really meant business, he would go

after the elites among them.

So there are a couple of powerful motives

for William Phipps to want to put an end to the witch trials.

It's a huge crisis, and he needs to do something immediately.

♪ ♪

♪ ♪

Governor Phipps decides that public opinion

has shifted enough to call a stop to these proceedings.

Governor Phipps dismantles the courts

responsible for the brutal witch trials.

The remaining accused are safe from execution.

The people still in jail are released.

Tituba was kept in prison for at least a year.

There's a statement from the jailer

where he says that he hasn't been paid.

And we know that somebody paid that bill, which

leads us to think that maybe, in the end, Tituba was freed.

♪ ♪

Samuel Parris's role in the witch trials

had created such bad blood within the village.

Parris, by that point, is very embittered.

He feels that he's failed as a minister.

The family members of some of the executed

actually successfully pushed him out of the village

and out of his ministry.

So what's left at Salem?

Not very much.

A dislocated community where neighbors are not

speaking to each other.

The whole church structure has fallen apart.

♪ ♪

The economic impact of that would

have been very significant.

The pendulum of support swings towards the families

of the accused.

It becomes an episode the whole community

really wants to forget about.

There is a legacy of guilt

and unease over the whole affair.

♪ ♪

It could never go back to the way it was.

♪ ♪

In January 1697, the general court

orders a day of prayer and fasting

to reflect back on the history of the witch trials.

♪ ♪

Then another of the judges publishes a public apology

for his role in the trials.

♪ ♪

In 1752, Salem Village rebrands itself.

It calls itself Danvers.

It's caused a lot of division, a lot of friction.

And then in the 20th century, it's revisited.

♪ ♪

In 1957, the state of Massachusetts

apologized for the witch trials.

That happened partly because of a play, "The Crucible."

And that play is really the reason why the Salem witch

trials are so famous today.

♪ ♪

Historians have been trying ever since to explain

these terrible events.

This started with two young girls being

sick at the house of a minister.

♪ ♪

People have wondered whether the girls were psychotic.

Were they lying?

Did they make the whole thing up?

A lot of the blame is placed on the girls

who made the original accusations.

But that exonerates the men who led the trials,

who rendered the judgment.

These men were the literal adults in the room,

and they have blood on their hands

far more so than the young, powerless, original accusers.

♪ ♪

It's retained this status as a sort of almost

archetypal witch hunt, in part because it was extraordinary

and it was extreme and it happened so rapidly.

It provided this really vivid example

of how witch hunts can snowball and how

on the basis of some slightly strange behavior

from two adolescent girls, hundreds of people

can be accused and a proportion of them can be executed.

You can see that the community's misogyny

and racism is reflected in their choice of suspects.

Tituba, a Native American woman previously enslaved.

Sarah Good, a very poor woman, somebody who was homeless.

Sarah Osborne, a woman who was regarded

as being insufficiently submissive to those around her.

Dorothy Good, she's gone through seriously

traumatic things within this jail

and allegedly is insane by the time she's allowed

to leave when she's five.

♪ ♪

The lessons that colonists learn from Salem

aren't entirely clear.

Even the regret over the trials didn't shake anyone's belief

in the existence of witches, didn't make them apologetic

or regret the wars against Native people

on the northern frontier.

What Salem did was make them regret the amount of authority

that they invested in the young female accusers.

That to them was the lesson from Salem,

not to trust the word of young women

quite like they had before.

♪ ♪

♪ ♪