Salem Witch Trials Research Paper

Words: 1520
Pages: 7

Would fear of magic drive you to kill the innocent? During the year 1962, two girls fell into an illness that changed their behaviors erratically; they were later diagnosed as being bewitched. A tale was created by the girls that spread from neighbor to neighbor, causing mass hysteria and chaos in the town of Salem. Later that year, over 150 men and women were imprisoned on the accusation of witchcraft. By the end of the trials, 19 people were unfairly hung and executed; it was the largest witch trial to occur in the U.S. The Salem Witch Trials were unfair executions of the innocent caused by hearsay and mass panic. Elizabeth Parris and Abigail Williams were born into wealthy families; they had everything one could ask for. Until they decided they did not know enough, being young, the girls attempted to perform witchcraft for …show more content…
To hide from their mistakes, they drug down three other women who they thought would be quickly convicted. According to Brooke Nicholson, in her essay, she writes, “The three girls named three women as the cause of their soul’s torment and they selected Sarah Good, a beggar, notorious in Salem Village for her sullen temper and nasty tongue; Sarah Osborne, an elderly woman the townspeople suspected of immortality; and Tituba, the Parris family slave who was asked to perform an occult ritual and obeyed the orders of a white woman” (Nicholson, 2). Each woman that was accused had been thought to use witchcraft before, and although there was no evidence of such, hearsay from neighbors led to the young girls choosing the outcasts. The women who were accused were slaves and women with tainted social status. The first woman accused of witchcraft was a slave to the Parris family. Although there are many different accounts of her background, most say Tituba was brought from Barbados to serve the Parris