About twenty years ago, I had the unusual task of being a juror at Grace Sherwood’s witch trial in Colonial Williamsburg. Her neighbors, John and Jane Gisburne, accused Sherwood of bewitching their pigs and cotton. It was our job to determine her guilt or innocence.
Like the others in her “Jury of Peers,” the situation started almost comical but quickly turned dark and ominous when the details of the defendant’s crimes were explained. But this was modern-day America, and witchcraft was, at most, a fringe activity akin to Area 51 sightings. So, we jurors settled in for what should have been a quick and easy acquittal.
As we discovered during testimony, Grace had already been subjected to the witch water test and failed because she floated. This complicated our jury deliberations. A second hurdle came into our scope in the form of the King of England. The King had personally defined the parameters for identifying witches and wizards, and Grace fit that definition.
What started as a path to acquittal ended in a conviction, and we sentenced her to death by hanging. We folded when faced with disputing the “scientific” definition of a witch and challenging authority. The fear of nonconformity and being ostracized was obvious. The parallels to today’s world are chilling.
Salem Witch Trials
In early 1692, in Salem, Massachusetts, several young girls claimed to be possessed by the devil and accused some local women of witchcraft. These accusations spread through the colony like a wave of hysteria. As was the custom of the time, a court was quickly convened to examine the allegations.
The first person convicted of witchcraft was Bridget Bishop. Her “crimes” started the Salem hysteria when five young girls accused her of coming to them as a spirit and threatening them. Further accusations followed, and her repudiation of the allegations in court probably sealed her fate. She was found guilty of witchcraft and hung on June 10, 1692.
But the hysteria continued, and eighteen more people were hanged on Salem’s Gallows Hill before the hysteria abated and the courts came to their senses. Defendants were often accused, tried, and hung within days. Today, we do not physically hang people who are not WOKE; we excoriate them in the press and on social media without factual evidence or a trial.
Miles and Martha Corey
On September 19, 1692, Giles and Martha Corey were convicted of witchcraft in Salem; at the end of the period, we now refer to it as the “Salem Witch Trials.” The Coreys were found guilty because another townsperson, Ann Putnam, claimed that the spirit of Martha Corey had attacked her.
The absurdity continued when two local men decided to investigate. When asked what Martha Corey was wearing, Ann Putnam told them she did not know because Corey had temporarily blinded her. As a follow-up, the men visited Martha Corey, and she made the mistake of saying, “Ye are come to talk with me about being a witch.” When told of Ann Putnam’s accusation, Martha responded, “But does she tell you what clothes I have on?”
The connection between Ann Putnam’s and Martha Corey’s inquiries in the eyes of the inquisitors sealed her fate. How could she have known the question asked of Ann Peterson if she were not a witch? Lacking good evidence, she was held in custody for six months while a better case was constructed.
Her trial was a farce, with the girls making more accusations and, having fainting spells whenever Martha Corey looked at them. The girls also professed to see flying birds and other apparitions whenever Martha Corey looked at them. She was hanged on September 22, along with other several other women “convicted” of witchcraft.
Martha’s husband, Miles Corey, was inadvertently drawn into the circle of hysteria when it was revealed that Martha had hidden his saddle to keep him from attending one of the witch trials. He was accused of being a wizard but refused to enter a guilty or not guilty plea. His refusal to confess to the crimes he did not commit sealed his fate, and he was tortured to death.
For three days, Miles Corey endured a punishment where he was placed under great weight to force out a confession. He died after three days of this torture on September 19, 1692. (The actual punishment was to be stripped naked, then covered with heavy boards, and finally, more and more heavy stones were added until a confession was secured.) Some reported that his final words of defiance were, “More weight!”
Today’s Witch Hunt and Trials
Every day, we are bombarded with the WOKE nonsense concerning hundreds of genders, white privilege, climate change, January 6th conspiracies, LGBTQ+++++, same-sex marriages, abortion, social justice, cultural appropriation, pronouns, DEI, and critical race theory, to name a few. We even have “WOKE-washing where companies pretend to bow their knee to these issues for marketing and market acceptance.
Suppose you proclaim this gobbledygook to be nonsense. In that case, you are attacked by a social justice contingent as being out of step, ignoring science, or not being aware of or appreciative of the injustice in the world. You are treated like a witch, wizard, or outcast who must be purged from society. I often think the world has gone a bit mad and that nothing like this has ever existed before, but when I think through it a little more, it has happened.
Mob hysteria often repeats itself and then is thankfully flushed from society when the nonsense is exposed and runs its course. At the extremes, what emerges is the hysteria that gripped Salem. Today’s extremes come from an overload of questionable and objectional social media accusations facilitated through technology. We have also seen that this can be “proven” through other manufactured evidence in the hands of the powerful.
Historical and Hysterical Parallels
Parallels, like the Salem Witch Trials, were much more punitive but have eerie similarities to today’s hysteria over social issues. I shudder to think about what our world would descend into if the punishments of the late 1600s were visited on those who speak out today.
Today, anyone who challenges the WOKE narrative is labeled a modern-day Luddite, a “witch or wizard.” You are looked on with suspicion by a mob ready to bring you before a tribunal and to dole out punishment befitting the best of the 1600s.
Before you dismiss this as a phenomenon of a bygone era, I just learned that witches have been casting spells on President Trump since at least 2017. In the coming election, I am not placing my concerns on their spell-casting capacities, but you never know. It is a strange time, and Trump Derangement Syndrome might originate from some strange spell cast by an obscure witch or wizard in some remote corner of Massachusetts.
Modern Day Punishment Without Trials
Most conservatives, if we get down to it, feel like the world has been in a period of hysteria for years. Unlike the Salem Witch Trials, this hysteria has now continued for over a decade and has yet to run its course. It spreads like a virus through social media with little reliance on facts. They might not use the terms witch and wizard but instead use modern derogatory terms like MAGA, Deplorables, Nazis, and Fascists. They make baseless claims in the pursuit of power, knowing they are sensational and that many ignore facts to cling to the hyperbole.
As President Biden recently confirmed, liberals view us as “garbage,” the twenty-first-century equivalent of witches and wizards to be subjected to any punishment deemed necessary to rid society of our kind. For Washington elites, we are the hoi-polloi, the ordinary people to be marginalized, ignored, and denigrated. For them, we cling to our Bibles and guns and are generally not very intelligent.
What is unusual is how long the hysteria has lasted. This is an extraordinary feat for a society with a gnat’s attention span. It has only continued through the organized efforts of Washington bureaucrats, moneyed interests, and foreign governments. It has also persisted because many in our electorate fail to reason and think, just as the hysteria in Salem persisted.
The Pressing of President Trump
If you were to ask anyone today about the pressing death of Giles Corey or the Salem Witch Trials, they would dismiss them as a sad chapter in a bygone era, something that cannot happen today. Such punishments are beyond modern sensitivities, or are they?
Over the past four years, Democrats and Washington bureaucrats have made a concerted effort to remove President Trump from the political scene. They aimed to interfere in the 2024 election by vilifying and disqualifying. They essentially concocted a modern-day electronic equivalent of the Salem Witch Trials.
Their efforts failed, and as we stand on the eve of the election, he is still standing defiantly and, in many polls, leading. With a bit of luck, we are headed out of a very dark period in our Country’s history and into the light. We may just be leaving the gloom and doom of a dark wood and emerging into the light of a better time.
To the dismay of the Democrats, President Trump has withstood the weight of their persecution and prosecution, stared death in the face, and defiantly said, “More weight!”
Resources
Bridget Bishop, Wikipedia, wikipedia.org, Last accessed October 31, 2024.
Donald Trump ‘has a shield’ against witches plotting to curse him out of election race, By Charlie Jones, The Mirror US, themirroe.com, October 30, 2024.
Giles Corey, Wikipedia, wikipedia.org, Last accessed November 1, 2024.
Grace Sherwood (ca. 1660–1740), By Monica C. Witkowski, Encyclopedia Virginia, encyclopediavirginia.org, December 7, 2020.
Here’s what ‘woke’ means and how to respond to it, By Letitia Meynell, The Conversation, theconversation.com, December 20, 2023.
Salem Witch Trials, By History.com Editors, History, history.com, November 4, 2011.
Salem witch trials, By Jeff Wallenfeldt, Britannica, britannica.com, October 17, 2024.
Salem witch trials, Wikipedia, wikipedia.org, Last accessed October 27, 2024.
The Salem Witch Trials: A Comprehensive Analysis from a Historian‘s Perspective, By History Tools, History Tools, historytools.org, May 26, 2024.
The Witchcraft Trial of Martha Corey, By Rebecca Beatrice Brooks, History of Massachusetts Blog, historyofmassachusetts.org, August 31, 2015.
The Witches of Salem and the Origin of Their History, By Sumey Poot Lopez, Plan B, planb.mx, October 4, 2023.
These witches are trying to use their power to defeat Donald Trump, By Merra Raman, The Toronto Star, thestar.com, October 20, 2024.
Witches cast ‘mass spell’ against Donald Trump, BBC News, bbc.com, February 25, 2017.
Woke, Wikipedia, wikipedia.org, Last accessed October 28, 2024.
