Salem Massachusetts, 1692. A child becomes ill. She is the minister’s daughter and has stopped eating and speaking except for intermittent cries of terror. Soon her cousin begins showing more extreme symptoms, convulsing and screaming that she is being tormented.

 

It was a typically cold, hard winter. The harvest was poor. There was political tension, and the ever-present threat of Indian attacks. An oppressive season in an oppressive society.

Bored with the long winter, their daily chores, lessons and scripture, some of the village girls sought the company of the minister’s Barbados slave, Tituba. She entertained them with colorful tales of magic and voodoo, reading their fortunes and baking “witches’cakes.”  

 

Soon a few more of the girls began behaving strangely, contorting their bodies and crying out against invisible specters. "Look! Do you not see it? The devil, he pinches me!"

 

The town physician was called in and his diagnosis was that they were bewitched.

“The evil hand is on them!”  he declared. 

 

The so-named “afflicted” girls were pressed to tell who had bewitched them. Predictably, Tituba was the first to be accused. Then along with adults who had agenda of their own, they began “naming names”  and crying "WITCH!"

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This is when suspicion, greed and enmity, indeed EVIL, took possession of Salem.

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