Why Is It So Hard To Call The Hysteria 'Human'?

         One thing I’ve noticed in our studies of the Salem Witch Trials, and all witch hunts to an extent, is that the human element is often lost. 

        I posit that part of the reason is because it’s easy to get caught up in the psychology of wondering why people would behave ‘like that’, or to reflect with our modern awareness of science on how unrealistic their ideals of witchcraft are. It’s also easy to lump the victims together as just ‘victims’, particularly when thinking about the inherent injustice of the court case from a legal standpoint. Anger on account of the idea of ‘guilty until proven innocent’ is also a common reaction, just as we with our modern view of a good court system default to disgust at the lengths Salem’s legal system went to in order to acquire confessions. 

        Shown by how ghost stories and true crime media are growing in popularity by the decade, humans have long held a fascination for the macabre. However, I would put forth the idea that the macabre gets harder to engage with when we’re reminded of the real suffering of real people. 

All of these emotions we feel on considering the events of Salem are the emotions of a bystander. When we look at Salem, we are outsiders looking in, spectators visiting the zoo that is the dark side of our own country’s past. Salem’s witch hysteria is easy to talk about because it happened to someone else. 

One example of this is how Tituba’s mention of a ‘little yellow bird’ became ingrained in several peoples’ testimonies throughout the trials. Less mentioned is the fact that little yellow birds, which became so ingrained with Salem’s witch hysteria, might have been something Tituba remembered from Barbados, where such birds are common. Dwelling on this would mean addressing the painful history that Tituba was enslaved, taken from her home, and scapegoated in a hysteria that wasn’t her fault in the name of a religion that wasn’t her own. 

Considering this would feel too real, too human, and almost not sensational enough. Particularly white Americans feel more comfortable with the lurid, thrilling horror of witchcraft and temporary madness, and far less comfortable with the banal, systemic horrors of slavery and religious and patriarchal overreach. 

We shy away from addressing the very real fear that the young accusers such as Ann Putnam and Betty Parris faced from their powerless position in a religious, patriarchal society that saw children as needing to be broken in order to be purified. And we are even less likely to delve into the true grief and fear experienced by the accused like Sarah Good, who was sent to prison with her infant daughter, leaving her four year old daughter alone. We don’t want to confront the fact that Sarah’s infant daughter Mercy died in her arms due to the terrible prison conditions, or the fact that Sarah’s other daughter, four-year-old Dorothy, was arrested and tortured into making the confession that condemned her mother to death at the gallows. We don’t talk about how that must have haunted Dorothy to her own grave. 

        Even within the trials themselves, the human element was often lost, like how the marks on Tituba’s body from being beaten by Samuel Parris were attributed to the devil. Attributing the horrors to righteous justice, as the Puritans did, doesn’t strike me as being all that different from a modern audience acting as though the hysteria was completely unprompted and unfathomable and thus suitable for consumption as entertainment. 

        As much as I would like to believe that we as a society can begin to look past the sensational, set aside our own indignation at how history misaligns with our current sensibilities, and just focus on the real people that were deeply hurt, I just don’t believe it’s likely. Suffering feels safer when it’s just a story.