Is there any indication from a modern day perspective to what the girls' problems actually may have been? Psychosomatic issues or physical illness, anything like that?
I’m a bit surprised no one’s written a book just on that subject, to be honest. There are dozens of ideas and theories, and in reality there were probably multiple causes working together and feeding off of each other (at least later, when dozens of people were involved).
At the time of the witchcraft diagnosis, the adults who were watching Betty and Abigail were firm in their belief that there was no medical cause - Reverend Hale specifically said that there was no chance either of them was epileptic, for instance, and it seems like there were probably a lot of medical treatments for various ailments being thrown around the parsonage early on. There were, of course, plenty of diseases that cause neurological symptoms that didn’t have real medical definitions yet or weren’t understood. The most common ones talked about are encephalitis, lyme disease, and ergot poisoning. Any of these could cause some of the symptoms, but not all, and they tend to get thrown around as quick and easy answers while ignoring the complexity of the situation (much like what happened during the trials, actually).
Ergot in particular gets talked about a lot because it’s sort of the “fun” diagnosis. It’s a type of fungus that grows on certain types of grain, and can produce a terrible kind of food poisoning called convulsive ergotism, which effects the central nervous system as well as the stomach. It’s a powerful hallucinogenic and is actually the main ingredient in LSD. This does explain many of the girls’ symptoms. The problem is that this disease would have been widespread (because everyone was eating the same food) and deadly, and it was not. There is no medical reason why, for instance, the girls tended to be well-behaved and calm until adults came to watch them. Disease doesn’t need an audience.
Back then, if you couldn’t find a medical diagnosis for a disease, the ultimate answer was witchcraft. Nowadays when doctors can’t figure out what is happening to a group of sick people, the diagnosis is mass psychogenic disease, or mass hysteria, which is just as vague and frustrating. Essentially it’s psychosomatic - people who are emotionally vulnerable, often stressed and isolated teenage girls, become convinced that something terrible is going to happen to them, and then they react as if the threat were real. It’s like when someone mentions lice around you and then suddenly you get itchy and start to freak out. The last diagnosed case was last year, when a bunch of kids in South America thought they were possessed by the devil after playing that Charlie Charlie game.
So you can combine that with the obvious stress these “bewitched” people were in, and it’s easy to see how someone could believe they were bewitched and start acting like it. First, just about everyone believed in witches. Even the people who thought the trials were a complete sham still believed in evil spirits and magical powers - to doubt the existence of witches implied that you doubted the existence of Satan, and therefore doubted the existence of God. So everyone involved (at the beginning) believed that possession and bewitchment was a real phenomenon that could happen to anyone, and that if, for instance, you tried fortune telling, you were asking for it.
Most of the bewitched people were also young-ish girls, who were isolated physically from the "modern” world back in England, and emotionally isolated because of their sex. Women and children were meant to be entirely submissive, and had no outlet to vent their frustration and anger with their bleak lives. Many of them were orphans, and others were refugees fleeing the Indian wars in Maine. Mercy Lewis, one of the most outspoken of the girls, was both, and it is entirely plausible that she and several others were suffering from PTSD, as they dragged visions of Indian devil worship into the mix. The ever-present threat of the war travelling down to Salem, and the presence of Indian slaves in town, would have exacerbated their issues. Mercy was also a servant, and she and the others often hinted at abuse at home as well.
Also on the medical side, many of the complaints against witches featured bewitched people waking up in the middle of the night to witches sitting on top of them and preventing them from fighting back or crying for help. This is pretty classic sleep paralysis, and if you combine that kind of frightening experience with widespread hysteria, it’s easy to see how so many of these experiences happened.
Lastly, there were people involved who were deliberately acting. We know this because at least one girl admitted to throwing around accusations for “sport”, and because of the various signs of bewitchment that have no other explanation, like bite marks, pins stuck in the body, and people being found tied up. Some have suggested that a few of the girls may have been self-harming and using it to their advantage. I suppose some of the fraud could have been done subconsciously, but for the most part it seems clear that there was some very shady business happening as the trials progressed.
At the very beginning though, most people just think that the girls were stressed beyond belief and, thinking that their souls were in danger and that they could be bewitched at any time, they started to believe that it was actually happening.
jacobvanloon
snowghoul
kaledo-art
2087
turnnoffyourmind
