The afterlife of the party ✞

Two little girls playing gently with a daddy long legs.

Girl 1: can it die?

They did nothing resembling what they were accused of. Despite older historical claims that they were probably mostly cunning-women/doing folk magic, or that they were midwives or abortionists or whatever else, the fact is that they usually they did nothing at all, and their worst “crime” was some trait or past action which got them targeted for blame when something bad happened independently to another person or community (someone falls ill or starts behaving very strangely; your crops fail, especially because of bad weather/hail; your animals die; your wife miscarries or dies in childbirth, etc…).

Those things could be any combination of, or in addition to,

Being viewed as antisocial/against the community, mean-spirited, or ‘power-hungry’ in some way

Being socially outcast

Being elderly (& a woman usually)

Being unmarried or widowed

Being an (accused or real) adulterer, divorcee, someone who’d engaged in unmarried sex, or otherwise considered sexually “tainted”

Having had a lot of family members die (especially repeated miscarriages or dead babies)

Being disabled

Being a religious minority

Being a foreigner

Being an ethnic minority

Sometimes accusations were made up over personal vendettas; sometimes they were completely random because they originated from things like torture or pressuring children to come up with answers; and sometimes they were knowingly invented for profit or social clout by a professional ‘witch hunter’. Often they were led or further-fueled by secular or religious authorities figures who believed in conspiracy theories about witches being present as a secret, underground sect of devil worshippers trying to create as much chaos and suffering as possible before the Second Coming of Christ. The more powerful the person in charge who believed the accusations, the higher the death toll typically.

Accusations often resulted in collective paranoia and a cascading effect of attempting to locate multiple witches, particularly in areas where it was believed that witches always met and worked in groups—therefore if you have one witch you must have more in hiding nearby.

Admissions were almost invariably gathered through torture, coercion, and/or gaslighting people to the point where they questioned the severity and cause of their own ‘actions’. The fact that sleep deprivation was common for interrogation meant a LOT of people likely hallucinated what they admitted to, and at the time nobody knew that lack of sleep could make you see things that weren’t real or considered it a form of torture.

Salem-specific details under the cut if anyone’s interested. TL;DR the contributing factors in Salem included most of the things I mentioned.

Some things are a job, and other things are a privilege.