Turns out those folks in Salem Village, MA could have saved themselves a lot of trouble and a bunch of lives if they had just turned to science for the answers.
In 1692, young village girls began experiencing violent fits that included contortions and uncontrollable outbursts of screaming. The general consensus was that they were bewitched, at the time a popular assumption for the unexplainable. The Puritans, a superstitious bunch, were mainly immigrants from Europe where for centuries tens of thousands were executed for witchcraft, the majority of them women.
The young girls, encouraged by the elders to identify their bewitchers, blamed three women – a slave from the Caribbean, a homeless beggar and an elderly woman married to an indentured servant. The women were arrested and interrogated for days. Two maintained their innocence but the Caribbean slave eventually confessed. All three were jailed to await their trial.
That time in history was a tough one. The Puritan lifestyle was rigid and difficult. They had just suffered through the after-effects of a British war with France and a smallpox epidemic. Ongoing threats of attack from Native Americans and a long simmering rivalry with their more affluent neighbors in Salem Town led to a collective fear of outsiders.
Once lit accusations spread like wildfire. Some settled old grudges by accusing their enemies. Others were arrested for their perceived immoral lifestyles, citing an ability to tempt men, gossiping, promiscuity and fortune telling among their crimes. Many, but not all, were social outcasts. Among the nearly 200 eventually arrested, most were female including a 4-year-old girl whose reticence to answer questions was seen as her admission of guilt.
In the ensuing trials, admissible evidence included the retellings of dreams and visions. Minister Cotton Mather, then president of Harvard, begged the courts to exclude this spectral evidence. Governor Phipps, who’s own wife was questioned for witchcraft, agreed and dismantled the tribunal putting an end to it.
Before the dust settled and cooler heads prevailed, 19 people were hanged, seven others died in jail and the husband of one of the accused witches was pressed to death by stones.
By 1697 they began to see the error of their ways, beginning with a day of fasting and soul searching. In 1702 the trials were declared unlawful and in 1711 a bill was passed restoring the rights and good names of the accused and providing restitution to the heirs. It wasn’t until 1957 that the state of Massachusetts formerly apologized to the victims.
It was around the formal apology that two scientific theories emerged to explain the Puritan behavior. A psychology-based theory proposes that due to the stressful times they lived in, a type of mass hysteria took hold as a way for them to control their environment. The other, more likely theory is science-based and suggests that the Puritans ingested a fungus common in their rye and wheat crops. The fungus, a cousin to the hallucinogen LSD, causes the same symptoms those young women exhibited so many years ago. Science for the win.