The Witches Strike Back
By Nathan K.
There was another execution on Proctors Ledge.
There was a lot of chaos in Salem in 1692. People thought that witchcraft was going on. Witches were people who were thought to be controlled by the devil in exchange for his trust. The witches used their power to cause harm and hurt people in Salem. The government had a lot of ways to figure out if people were witches or not. First they did some tests on the “witches”. They would ask simple questions. Then if they thought the accused person was a witch, they went to more extreme testing.
One of the more extreme ways of testing if someone was a witch was water torture. People in the government took the people who were accused of being a witch to a fast flowing stream, and just threw the accused into the water. If the person floated with black magic, they were a witch, and they would be tortured and executed. If the person sunk and drowned, they were innocent. Either way they died. In another way to test if someone was a witch, an examiner used specially designed needles to repeatedly stab and prick at the accused person’s skin until they discovered a spot that produced the desired results. If the accused were witches, then torture devices would be used to try to get the witches to say who the other witches were. After this, they would be hanged.
The hangings took place on Proctors Ledge. This was where a total of 19 people were hanged and killed. These hangings would be done in the open for anyone to see. The government did this publicly because they wanted to get rid of the witches making harm around the world, and to scare off the other witches because they would watch their friends and family die right in front of their faces. After the trial, if the accused person was declared a witch, the torture would begin. The government would go through a lot of methods to try to get people to say who the other witches were.
People thought that the devil gave witches the power to cause harm and hurt people in exchange for his trust. Puritans did not know what was going to happen to them, their family, and their friends. They did not know if they could trust their families and friends. Puritans sometimes even accused their families and friends of lying and of being a witch.
When some people were asked “are you a witch?” they just said “no I am not”. They did this because some of them believed in religion so much that they did not to lie because that would be a sin. In Salem, you get punished if you horse around in church. They sometimes torture you with the same stuff they torture witches to get them to say the names of the other witches. They knew if they lied and said they were a witch the government would take all of their stuff. But lying is a sin and that is really bad. Some people believe in their religion so much that they said “no I am not a witch” knowing they were going to get punished and killed for lying. They did this for their religion. Also they did this because some of them did not want the government to take all of their stuff because then they will have nothing and they will be living poor and have a miserable life.
In conclusion, the Salem Witch trials was a lot of chaos. These methods of trying to figure out who the witches where and torturing the witches were grousm and no one wanted it to happen to them. This is what everyone was scared about. Either getting hurt by a witch or getting convicted as a witch.
