This is part two of the Salem Witch Trials. If you haven’t listened to part one, go back and get a little recap. We talk about the time period and the social climate at this time, a lot different than it is now. It’s not like 2025, it’s a whole different world. It was like God first, then God, country, husband, children, wife. That’s kind of how the hierarchy went.

We started going over the hysteria that was building. It was getting wild and people were confessing. Now if you’re a non-believer in witchcraft but you see that people were confessing, what does that mean? Is it that people are just scared? It’s hysteria. They’re confessing under duress, probably hoping not to get killed. Maybe if I confess, they won’t murder me.

What would it have to take for you to confess to something horrible that you never did? There are situations where you’re on trial for something you didn’t do, but there’s weird circumstantial evidence and your lawyer says they’re going to offer you a deal. It’s either three years in prison or you get life. What do you want to do? I would still have a hard time saying that I did something I didn’t do. At what point is your own integrity more important than the public eye?

Let’s take an example. Everybody knows right now us three are here in this location recording. Something happens to Sean. Everyone immediately accuses you and I. Say he’s walking, drinking a beer, and he trips and hits his head on a pole, but it looks pretty weird. Everybody knows it’s us two sitting here. And so all the evidence points to us. Say there was a major financial gain, like you guys get my shares of the podcast. Then we go to court and the evidence is stacked against us, and we’re given the opportunity to take the deal. I definitely think in this example you guys would roll on each other instantly.

Now this is not really that close to what’s been happening in Salem in 1692, but we’re trying to understand why people would be confessing. It’s also crazy how they were testing for it. Even if you used the scientific method, you would blindfold the person, then put their hand around a person, and if they react, that would be better. But instead they’re like, look for the person you hate the most, then react, and they can’t see you walking. The spectre’s biting me.

So where we left off, people were being arrested and the trials were starting to begin. They spread to the big town and the big town’s going crazy. Even kids were next to their parents in the jail cell. By May of 1692, the jails in Salem Town and the neighboring Ipswich were overflowing with the accused. Bewildered farmers, grandmothers, tavern keepers, and servants languished in dark vermin-infested cells awaiting a legal reckoning.

So many had been arrested that the colony’s new governor, Sir William Phipps, established a special court to prosecute the witchcraft cases. This court of Oyer and Terminer, that’s what it was called, convened in Salem Town in early June. Its leading figure was Deputy Governor William Stoughton, a stern and zealous judge determined to root out the devil’s minions. These guys are holy warriors. They’re coming in hot.

Right out the gate, this is the part that really made things horrible. The trials began and the court made a fateful decision. They would allow something called spectral evidence, which in essence is no evidence. This is a very weird thing to allow in a trial. It’s basically allowing witnesses to say, I saw your spectre come down and bite you and now you’re infected, and that’s evidence. How can a spectre bite anyways? How can this ethereal being come down and bite you?

The testimony of afflicted persons that they saw the spectre or spirit of the accused tormenting them was taken as proof of guilt. Ministers and learned men had long debated this issue. Could the devil take the shape of an innocent person without their permission? Prominent clergymen warned that Satan might impersonate the godly. But Stoughton’s court sided with those who believed a witch’s spectre could not act without the witch’s consent.

So basically what that means is if the girls said they saw your spectre afflicting them in a dream or a vision, the court assumed you had sent your spirit willingly. Because it needs your approval, he needs a sign-off. You’ve got to sign the paperwork before the spectre can get sent out. It’s like that vampire thing where you can’t let him in. You’ve got to invite them into your home.

The first to go on trial was Bridget Bishop, a feisty middle-aged woman known to dress in flamboyant red outfits. Bridget had been suspected of witchcraft for years before and was an easy target. She quarreled with her neighbors and had a checkered past. On June 2nd, she stood before the court in Salem’s meeting house, hands shackled together as her accusers testified. Young women fell into fits at the sight of her, claiming Bridget’s spectral shape was assaulting them that very moment.

I just want to point something out here. Notice how the accusers are only women. There are no dudes that are like, oh, I’m afflicted. The dudes are the evil white guys in the background grabbing their beard. I’m not saying women are bad, I love women, but it’s just funny that women are notorious for the drama. Oh, did you see what she was wearing? They’ve been doing it forever. This is the proof right here.

The court also produced tangible evidence: dolls with pins stuck in their heads allegedly found in Bishop’s cellar. Also a witch’s teat, an unnatural mole on her body that was said to suckle the devil. So she has a mole. If Cindy Crawford was on the stand, she’s got a mole and that was evidence of a witch’s teat. Sorry, we’re not misogynists, I swear.

Bridget Bishop defended herself vigorously, denying all charges. But the judges and the jurors, spellbound by the afflictions on display and all the superstition that was going around the town, found her guilty of witchcraft. Eight days later on June 10th, Bridget was carted from jail to the gallows and hanged by the neck until she was dead. She became the first official execution of the Salem witch trials.

This is like the Asian game shows where they have a random dude in a suit with a briefcase go down a public roadway where there’s a shitload of people walking, and he starts running and screaming, and then everyone just freaks out and starts running the other way. This is what it is, just the hysteria. It’s infectious and everyone gets freaked out and goes crazy.

Over the course of the summer, trial after trial sealed the fates of many more. In July, five women were tried, convicted, and sentenced to hang: Rebecca Nurse, Sarah Good, Susanna Martin, Elizabeth Howe, and Sarah Wilds. Rebecca Nurse’s trial had been particularly heart-wrenching. Initially the jury returned a verdict of not guilty because she had a fantastic reputation. But upon hearing the verdict, Judge Stoughton was dissatisfied. He pressed the jury to reconvene and reconsider.

He pointed out that Rebecca had made a confusing remark implying familiarity with another accused witch’s guilt. In truth, the partially deaf Rebecca didn’t even hear the question. Under Stoughton’s stern eye, the jurors reconsidered, reversed their decision, and sent her to death. Could you imagine being in this huge high-profile case and they say not guilty, and the judge says, wait, are you super sure? Let’s just take a quick recess and come back and do another vote.

Rebecca Nurse rode in a jolting cart to the gallows, sitting upright with quiet dignity despite the sobbing of family members nearby. Her children and friends had petitioned to save her life, but she was executed as well. Where are the families at? If someone took my kid and said they’re doing witchcraft, I’d say, I’ve got this pitchfork here, and you’re going to have to go through me.

That same day, Sarah Good stood at the foot of the gallows. Reverend Nicholas Noyes urged Good in her final moments to confess and save her own soul, kind of like in Braveheart, confess your sins and you will be free and we’ll end this torture. She retorted coldly that he should be the one worried about saving his own soul. Sarah Good’s little infant, born in the squalor of a prison, had already died before her, because remember she was pregnant. And then the rope silenced Good, as well as five others, as they swung gently in the hot July breeze, casting long shadows over the stunned onlookers.

I would not want to live in this town. I’d say we’re moving, we’re getting out of here. Time travel wise, I would not go back. That’s the worst place to go back to.

In August, the net of persecution even snared a man, a man of God, Reverend George Burroughs. He was a former minister of Salem Village and was fetched back from his new home in Maine in chains. The villagers he once ministered to now called him the ringleader of the witches. Despite having served as a Puritan pastor, Burroughs was vulnerable. He had quarreled with the Putnam family years earlier.

Let’s remember the last name Putnam because they were part of episode one. They were the ring leaders. Some conspiracy theorists believe the Putnams were more about a land grab. We’ll get into it at the end. This land should be kind of free because it’s tainted by the devil, we’ll take it and purify it for you. The Putnams are the family that get brought up the most. They’re in a quarrel of this, a quarrel of that, they accuse this person. The Putnams are the common denominator here.

At his trial, witnesses breathlessly described Burroughs’s astonishing feats of strength, claiming they were possible only because the devil was on his side. The homie is literally strong and they’re like, that’s clearly the devil, no one’s that ripped. He was a compact but muscular minister and was said to have carried a heavy musket with just one finger and hoisted barrels of molasses that no ordinary man could move. Could you imagine getting killed because you’re just strong? Saquon Barkley back in the witch trials, they would have burned him immediately.

Most damning were the accusations of the afflicted girls and some of the confessors that Burroughs was the minister of. So they would confess to him. What they literally said is, I saw his spectre while I was confessing. I feel bad for the guy because he was trying to do good and then he got boned. It’s like, hey Eric, you know I committed this crime, and you say you should really alert the authorities, and then all of a sudden Eric’s going to prison.

Reverend Burroughs maintained his innocence with composure and elegance. Nonetheless he was found guilty and condemned to die. On August 19th, 1692, George Burroughs was among a group of five taken to what was now called Gallows Hill. He mounted the ladder and, before the noose was secured, asked to speak. In a clear, calm voice, Burroughs surprised the assembled crowd by flawlessly reciting the entire Lord’s Prayer from beginning to end. A hush fell. According to popular belief, no witch could utter that holy prayer without faltering.

So some believed he was being hanged as an innocent. He’s like, I’m going to use your game against you. Witnesses say some in the crowd murmured that perhaps the accused minister was innocent after all. But this is where it gets strange. As they were being hanged, a man rode up on horseback to witness the execution. His name was Cotton Mather. Quickly he addressed the people and reminded them that the devil can masquerade as an angel of light. He warned them not to be deceived by a show of piety, that Satan’s servants might yet have unnatural tricks. And the execution proceeded. Burroughs and the four others, including Martha Carrier, known defiantly as the queen of hell, were hanged. What a dick, rides up just to make sure they kill him.

Back in the jails, conditions grew more hellish by the day. The summer heat and overcrowding bred disease. At least five died in prison before they even had their trial. Among them was poor Sarah Osborne, one of the first three accused that we went over in the original episode. She perished in a Boston jail in May before she could even be tried. Ann Foster, the elderly woman from Andover, confessed under duress but then succumbed to sickness behind bars before her trial. These people need a natural disaster, a reset, like a volcano just to cleanse this psycho town.

In one cramped cell, Alice Parker and Mary Parker, two unrelated women who had the same last name, comforted one another as they awaited judgment. Nearby, Dorcas Hoar, an accused witch with wild gray hair, managed to escape execution by confessing at the last hour and was given a temporary reprieve. She became the only convicted witch to evade hanging by confessing just in time. This is what I was telling you about. They’re probably confessing to show leniency. Yeah, I was the devil, he tainted me, I didn’t want to do it.

September brought a final spasm of the witch panic and its most ghastly episode of cruelty. Among the accused languishing in jail was Giles Corey, the husband of Martha Corey. Stubborn and strong-willed, Giles was a weathered farmer who, after seeing the frenzy of the trials, had lost all faith in receiving a fair hearing. His own wife had been condemned in the court’s last session despite being innocent.

When Giles was brought before the court, he made a defiant choice and stood mute. He refused to speak. He refused to enter a plea. He refused to do anything. This is the William Wallace right here. Unfortunately he was given a horrific punishment called the peine forte et dure. The court, eager to make an example of Giles, ordered this ancient penalty.

On September 19th, Giles was led out into an open field next to Salem’s jail. He was stripped naked and made to lie down in a shallow pit. A heavy wooden board was placed on his chest, and under the hot sun the sheriff and his men began piling stones atop the plank. Each rock added crushing weight onto the old man’s rib cage. Their intent was to torture him until he either spoke or was dead. Villagers gathered at a distance, watching in morbid silence broken only by Corey’s groans and the sheriff’s barks.

After hours of agony, as his bones began to crack and his organs were slowly compressed, Giles’s tongue lolled from his mouth. Legend holds that in his final moments he was asked finally to plead, and the only words that came from his mouth were, more weight. I’m getting a shirt with this guy on it. He refused to give the court the satisfaction, and one more stone was put on him, and that’s when Giles died. He was pressed to death in the field, but his spirit unyielding. The gruesome spectacle marked the only use of torture to execute a victim during the hysteria.

That is a pretty badass way to go out. Pure defiance. His will was stronger than their whole thing. That’s going to be our merch, a shirt that just says more weight. Like Ronnie Coleman, lightweight, more weight, come on.

Three days later on September 22nd, the final round of executions took place. Eight convicted witches were carted to the gallows, the largest group yet to die in a single day. Among them were Martha Corey, who is Giles’s wife, and Mary Esty. Samuel Wardwell of Andover also climbed the gallows that day. He had foolishly confessed to witchcraft earlier, spinning some crazy story of fortune-telling and satanic pacts, but then, stricken by conscience, recanted his confession. He was like, dude, I was wasted, I don’t know what I was thinking.

Wilmott Redd was another woman, along with Margaret Scott and Alice Parker, who all died that day. Some maintained their innocence while some just remained silent. It is said that the spectators at the last execution were much more subdued. It wasn’t everybody yelling like before, it was kind of mob mentality calming down.

At that point, 19 people in total had now been executed: 14 women and five men, and one was pressed, which was Giles. So people are probably starting to feel like, wait a minute, this is getting a little out of control. Are they really all witches? This part is a little rough too, because in the course of the hysteria two dogs were killed after being suspected of witchcraft. They thought they were familiars.

In one case, an afflicted girl accused a neighbor’s friendly dog of bewitching her with its spectral shape. The hysterical villagers promptly shot the poor animal. When the dog died, some observers, including Cotton Mather, the guy on horseback, concluded the dog was innocent after all. And this was their reasoning: if the devil was in disguise as the dog, he wouldn’t have died so easily. Because that’s the logical conclusion. This is why if I had superpowers I don’t know if I could be a good guy, because I would be killing these people.

Now this is the part where the hysteria kind of calmed down, or subdued a bit. Surviving prisoners still awaited justice, so there were still people in jail, but now they would face a new superior court that met in January. This time the superior court ruled out spectral evidence. And without spectral evidence, basically all the cases collapsed. Grand juries refused to indict dozens of the remaining suspects.

It’s so funny how once you put actual logic into it, they’re like, what are you talking about? You see these fits I’m having right now? It’s because of her. But why? Her spectre, obviously. The community was fanatical at the beginning, but then they were facing all these people dying, and it almost became a what have we done? I’m going to give my boy Giles credit. I think he was the straw that broke the camel’s back. They were like, dude, we crushed a homie to death.

How had their devout Puritan community committed such atrocities against their own neighbors? Over the years that followed, many sought to make amends. Judges and jurors asked for forgiveness. One of the trial judges publicly confessed his repentance and guilt. The afflicted girl Ann Putnam Jr., who had been one of the most vocal accusers, stood before her congregation in 1706, 14 years later, and tearfully apologized, saying that she had been deluded by Satan.

So this is her way of literally not taking responsibility. It’s like, I did it, but it wasn’t me. Eventually the colony itself admitted the trials were a terrible mistake. In 1711, the Massachusetts legislature passed a bill reversing many of the convictions and even paid compensation to some of the survivors. But a lot of them had died. It’s kind of like getting a posthumous medal. That doesn’t make anything better at all. It actually makes it worse.

It’s like the guys who are in prison for life with no DNA evidence, and then there is, and they get off. They’re free 30 years later, and they have no life now. What is the compensation that would make it okay? I don’t think anything could ever do it. Some of them have gotten a million dollars from the state, but it’s not enough. How do you give someone their entire life back when half of their family’s gone? Could you imagine missing everything, and they’re like, oops, our bad.

Imagine I go to prison now, my daughter’s four, and I’m in there 10 or 15 years. She’s going to be like, who the heck are you? And she’s been thinking this whole time that you’re a piece of crap, and all her friends are saying her dad’s a murderer, and your whole family’s dealing with that. There isn’t a dollar amount that makes it all good now.

Here are some of the statistics about the Salem witch trials. There were roughly 160 people accused of being a witch. It is confirmed that 155 were arrested or jailed. There were 156 people formally charged, and 30 that were convicted in court. There were 20 total deaths by sentence: 19 of those people were hanged, 14 of them women and five men, and one was by death press, pressed to death. At least five died in jail because of disease and malnourishment. So in total, 25 people died directly from this.

The youngest accused was Dorothy, age four. The oldest was Giles. He was 81, which is crazy. Eighty-one in the 1600s, you were like a thousand. Accusations spread beyond Salem Village. There were nearly 50 people who confessed to avoid immediate execution, and generally speaking those 50 implicated other people in order to get off. Snitches. It reminds me of The Departed.

An interesting part of the whole Salem witch trials is that nobody was burned at the stake. Not one person was burned in Salem. So Hollywood really gave us that, it’s much more dramatic. The famous image of witches being burned at the stake has deep roots in Europe, but it did not come from Salem or the American colonies. The idea of witch burning traces back to medieval and early modern Europe, where the punishment for witchcraft varied depending on local law, religion, and culture.

The association between witches and fire began in continental Europe between the 1400s and 1700s, during the height of the witch hunts there. The Catholic Church considered witchcraft not only heresy but a direct pact with the devil. Heresy under church law was punishable by burning, and it was seen as a way to purify the soul. This is probably synonymous with the Spanish Inquisition, where they tortured the heck out of you. There was an inquisitor manual in 1486 that codified the persecution of witchcraft by blending superstition with theology.

What’s crazy is these numbers are wild. Thousands of accused witches, mostly women, were executed across Germany, France, Switzerland, and Scotland, generally by public burning after torture or a forced confession. Estimates vary, but historians believe that between 40,000 and 50,000 people were executed for witchcraft in Europe, with burning being the most common. That’s generational. In contrast, England and its colonies, including Salem, followed English common law, which prescribed hanging, not burning.

In the Americas, burning was only reserved for crimes such as treason against the country. So while the lore of witches burning at the stake persisted in European memory, in art, folklore, and later Hollywood, the real Salem executions were by hanging, not by fire. So the burning witch became a symbolic shorthand. I think it goes hand in hand with the church literally running the state and being the supreme power in the land.

As we come to the conclusion of the actual story, the Salem witch trials remain one of history’s most infamous outbreaks of mass hysteria. This ordinary Puritan village descended into terror and accusation. Historians see no single cause, but rather a collision of religion, fear, politics, psychology, and a lack of science. Just a lack of logic, a lack of due process, a lack of scientific method with this spectral evidence.

There’s also religious extremism. Salem’s Puritans believed the devil was a literal force stalking New England. Every failed crop, every sick child seemed proof that Satan was at war against New England. This is before microbiology was a thing. There’s this thing called germs, homies, they live and you breathe them in. But beneath the theology simmered grudges, greed, and lust.

Salem Village was divided between two wealthy families, the Porters and the Putnams. Property disputes and feuds ran deep, and many of the accused were tied to the wrong faction. Accusation became the weapon of the day. The moment one neighbor cried witch and the witch was arrested, then the land was up for sale, on a discount too. In several cases the forfeited property of the witches later ended up in the hands of the accusers. This is the original cash grab, the original Bernie Madoffs.

Then throw in the fact that the misogyny was real, and the majority of the condemned were women. They defied Puritan norms. They were outspoken widows, poor beggars, independent thinkers. Imagine you’re the pastor, not a Putnam, and the Putnams say, you want a new little church, you need money to back that up, how about I build you one, but I’m going to need them kids to see some specters. And if you’re a nine-year-old girl and your dad says you’ve got to do this or you’re grounded, you say okay, whatever. Men have the power and your kids are going to do what you say in the 1600s.

Ultimately Salem’s tragedy grew from a perfect storm of faith, fear, and faction. When superstition replaced reason and authority fed hysteria, the three Fs, the trials collapsed and left a scar and a warning of how easily moral certainty can turn a community against itself. It’s weird how much public opinion swings. That’s the biggest flaw with the public justice system: your fate is in the hands of 12 people.

Perception is reality. What you perceive to be real is real for you because it’s what you’re perceiving. Imagine all I know about Steve is that two friends said Steve is a bad guy and they’ve seen him do messed-up stuff. If I’m trying Steve, my view is going to be that Steve’s probably a bad guy. I’ve been told he’s a bad guy, I don’t know him personally, and I have no evidence to say otherwise. Even the evidence that makes Steve out to be a good guy, I’m going to dismiss because I’ve been told these other things. That’s why you’re supposed to choose the jury based on whether they actually know the person, but back then that all goes out the window.

We have the news and reporting now, and all you’re seeing are these big high-profile cases, and it’s all skewed. I remember watching the Amber Heard and Johnny Depp trials. I was enthralled, I’ve never been so dialed in. Me and my wife were live-streaming it at home. I was so on Johnny Depp’s side. But I don’t know, I wasn’t there, I don’t have any information. That’s how powerful it is, other people saying things and you’re like, oh yeah, that makes sense to me, and you’ve already made the decision.

Do you think that applies to recent trials like Puff Daddy? A lot of people hate him because you saw the video of him with his girlfriend, so you’re like, you’re not some upstanding dude. That’s a little different because that’s not the only thing he was on trial for. But there was this picture of Puff Daddy painted, and that whole entertainment industry is very shady. It’s all about power and manipulation.

Transport back to when there was no social media in the 1700s. It’s the same thing, just in person. Everybody’s talking in the town hall. You run into Sean at the grocery store, the market, and it’s, hey, did you hear about that witch? Did you hear Susie Good was doing some witchcraft? That would have been some hot gossip at the time.

That leads us into the theories, and there are some interesting ones. We’re going to start with the ergot poisoning theory. Ergot is a fungus that grows on rye and can be on cereal grains and grasses. If there’s too much, it’s actually a precursor to LSD. So it’s more of a fringe scientific theory, but it’s often lumped into the Salem witch trials. The chicks are convulsing because they’re just tripping balls. The theory is the afflicted girls and possibly others were poisoned and had convulsions, paranoia, and visions, and ergot is chemically related to LSD.

It would mean the whole witch hysteria was actually a mass psychotropic episode sparked by tainted bread in Salem. What if MK Ultra was based on this? Look what they got. If we could get the masses to say witches exist, we can do anything. That’s not too far, smelling like CIA right here. Salem Ultra, Winston-Salem Ultra. Before that, I thought maybe they were just hungover and wasted, having this episode, and they want to get out of it so they blame it on someone else so daddy doesn’t drown them.

The criticism of this theory is that the symptoms would have been everywhere. It wouldn’t be a singular thing, because there was a lot of food sharing. Everyone was eating the same stuff. But maybe the guys aren’t going to admit it, because this is a time where they’re not trying to show any weakness. Especially since all illness was automatically the devil, so you’re instantly like, I feel great, no illnesses. Can you imagine you’re farming and seeing specters and you can’t tell anybody about it? I tell my wife and she’s going to rat me out to the church.

Another theory, and this is one of my favorites, is that it’s land seizure. There were powerful families, one of them the Putnams, and the theory is they used the trials to accuse rivals and then acquire their land for cheap after they were imprisoned or executed. What’s the easiest way to get rid of someone? Have the town take care of them. You’re the good guy, you’re the one who discovered the witch, and people are like, thank you so much for keeping us safe, take the land, you deserve it. How menacingly evil is that, a guy twiddling his fingers going, you know what we’re going to do, we’re going to do a witch epidemic and that’s how we’re going to get the land.

So you think he told his daughter she’s got to put the show on? The conspiracy would have to be deep and really evil. Maybe he didn’t tell her to put the show on, but maybe he said, are you sure you didn’t get bit by a spectre? And she’s like, yeah, that’s what happened, a spectre. Well honey, they’re not going to believe you unless you really show them.

Some of the evidence is that Ann Putnam Jr. was one of the main accusers, the one writhing on the floor. And behind the official complaints of the Putnam girl was the father who signed the paper saying this is a valid complaint from my family. Additional evidence is that they did acquire land from the people who died. But people argue, I don’t know if it’s just opportunity. The question is, is it conspiratorial or is it just opportunity? Did they cause the witch accusations in order to do it, or did it just happen and then they went and did it?

I think either way is still conspiratorial, because if you’re using an opportunity to then do illegal activity, it’s still conspiracy. You’re getting people wrongly accused based on bad evidence. The Putnam girl is one of the main accusers, oh whoops, what a happy coincidence, I just need this creek bed. A lot of historians are behind this theory, so this is not the crazy one, this is the most logical one. It makes the most sense. Maybe it started as, let’s just spread a rumor, and then it was, ooh, they’re really killing these people, that escalated quickly.

Another theory is the satanic bloodline conspiracy. In this theory, the Salem executions were part of a cover-up or a ritual sacrifice involving early American elites trying to cleanse the region of a competing spiritual or pagan lineage. It’s like a devil gang battle. Some claim the accused were all naturalists, midwives, and homeopathic individuals. Today it would be like big pharma taking out the chiropractors, the pharmaceutical company saying, no, no, don’t take vitamin C. But this time it was religious, competing spiritual lineages.

I just don’t see them taking out their own, because you wouldn’t want to bring heat to devil worship if you’re actively doing it. What does make sense about this theory is that it happened for 300 years before this in Europe, where they were just burning everybody. We should look into the land acquisition up in the EU. Of course, on this theory there’s no evidence whatsoever. This is just Reddit talk, a very deep subreddit, 60,000 comments down.

This next theory is that the trials were a social control experiment in early America. How much can we get away with, boys? The theory is Salem’s authorities used the witch trials as a deliberate psychological experiment to test the boundaries of obedience of the women in their village. It likens to the Stanford prison experiments, where they were testing how much you could control people, how much you can get away with.

I think these psychological experiments are later down the line. These homies didn’t believe in germs back then, I don’t think they’re doing deep psychological social experiments. The Stanford one was in the 60s or 70s, more like using acid, like MK Ultra. They already had pretty much complete control. Everyone was already pretty obedient, so I don’t think they were worried about that back then. But maybe there’s a semblance of how do we create a mass hysteria. I think these situations were used as a use case, as data for things they’ve done more recently.

Another theory, which we haven’t brought up much, is that it was real. Definitely not, it’s way too strong. But let’s touch on it. Define witchcraft. Are we talking about a spectre, or voodoo dolls? I think something could be true, but as I say it out loud, I don’t know about a witch putting a hex on somebody. Witchcraft has been given a bad name, a negative connotation, but it doesn’t necessarily have to be that. Are there things outside of our normal understanding? Yes, 100 percent. But I don’t think it’s like you can put hexes on people. I think it’s more extrasensory abilities outside of the norm.

I think people are in control of their own lives, so I think it can affect your own life but not someone else’s. If you had some extra ability, it’s only going to affect you. But that’s not witchcraft. Witchcraft is when you send it off to someone. That’s exactly why I don’t believe it, the hyper-directed I’m going to curse Eric thing. Somebody made a joke last episode, what about good things, I want Eric to be rich as heck, does that fall into witchcraft? Do you remember the movie The Craft? They were always making good stuff happen for themselves, I want that guy to love me, I’m going to be popular.

Witchcraft, in the most basic sense, refers to the practice of using ritual symbols, actions, or beliefs to influence energy, events, or outcomes. Its meaning varies widely depending on culture, religion, and historical context. But can it be positive? Yes, absolutely. Many practitioners view witchcraft as a form of empowerment, healing, and self-connection. Positive aspects could be personal growth, healing, or community wellness. So it’s like yoga. It can be used for healing, creativity, or reflection, much like yoga or prayer. Its impact depends on intent. Like reiki, where you do the crystals and the energy, or that massage where they don’t even touch you.

So as we lead to the end, the question is what happened, and was there any supernatural thing involved, or any conspiracy involved? I’m going to go with the conspiracy side. I’m going to go with the Putnam family and possibly the other family, that maybe they were behind it. Although the Putnam girl was the main accuser. There are two big driving emotions, fear and greed, and in this case it’s fear.

I think what happened is the Putnam girl, for whatever reason, accused the maid who worked there, the Caribbean slave, when she was maybe tripping or hungover and feeling bad. She picked this girl to call a witch, and from there the fear just started spreading. We saw this recently with COVID, the spreading of fear, and then back to the mob mentality. People are like, you’re trying to kill me and my family. Last episode we talked about the communism hunt, the Red Scare, a very similar thing.

I think it started as a cash grab and then went bananas. I think it started as, oh sick, I can put shade on them and eventually push them out, and then it escalated, and he’s like, well, I might as well just buy the land now. And then it became, oh, I just don’t like that person, I’ll use it for my own personal vendettas, and then it spiraled out of control and everyone’s like, you’re a witch, you’re a witch. When you see that religion came from Europe, where it was happening 300 years before this, somehow it came over here and took fire with the fear emotion and the mob mentality.

So initial cash grab into crazy into pure psychosis. I’m pretty much with you guys. I’ll add a little element. Remember when we did the history of the Black Plague? People were trying homeopathic ways, incense that looked weird, that could be considered witchcraft, or extra powers. That is ritual, that’s literally what we just talked about with witchcraft. It’s like you believe this is going to work.

Think about how powerful your own belief in a particular thing can be. People who get cured even though they’re taking a placebo, because they believe what they’re taking is going to fix them, but it’s literally sugar, and they get cured. If you believe something so strongly it can actually happen, it’s proven. Or you can go basic on it: you get a really bad sunburn and somebody comes with an aloe plant, cracks it, rubs it on you, and you go, this is witchcraft. I do believe there’s some nefarious thing behind this, because it’s too convenient. It wasn’t just an opportunity that fell into someone’s lap.