Salem Witch Trials Research Paper

Is it OK to kill people based solely on accusations? Kill innocent children? Burn women at the stake? Believe it or not, all of these atrocities and many more occurred in the town of Salem, Massachusetts in the late 1600’s, and it was all done in the name of religion. Over 150 men and women were accused of witchcraft and sentenced to the death penalty based on accusations with no legitimate evidence proving them guilty. The era of the Salem Witch Trials was one of the most bone-chilling times in American history. (Pelka) Reverend Samuel Parris wasn’t always a reverend. When Parris was in his mid-thirties, he was attending Harvard University, striving to become a minister. Before graduation time came around, he dropped out of Harvard and went

Tituba also cooked, cleaned and did any household chores her masters asked her to do. She claimed to be able to tell fortunes, so Reverend’s daughter and niece, Elizabeth and Abigail, wanted in on that. Tituba fluffed egg whites and put them in a glass bowl and used that as a crystal ball, and requested that the girls kept these meetings private. But, it didn’t take too long before the meetings consisted of many young girls, most of which were Abigail and Elizabeth’s friends. Some of the occurrences in these gatherings genuinely frightened the girls. There was once an imagine of a child’s coffin that appeared in the “crystal ball,” and the youngest girl from the group got startled and left the meeting.

Many of the tests that were done to check for innocence often resulted in death, even if innocence was proven. For instance, many believed that if weighted down, tied to a chair, and thrown into a body of water, a witch would still be able to float back up, and a non-witch wouldn’t be able to return to the top of the water. So in this test, they wouldn’t believe that a person was innocent until they had drowned and couldn’t even attempt to return to the top of the water. But, by then it was too late to accept their