Rebecca Nurse and Companions
"Witches" of Salem (1692)

Up here in the Northern hemisphere, it is a time of transformation; the days are getting shorter, the leaves are turning brilliant colors, and children will soon don their costumes for Halloween.  Along with the ghosts and goblins, there will be a variety of witches:  the “traditional” Halloween witch with a pointed black hat and a broomstick; Glinda the “good” witch from The Wizard of Oz; and the earthy Wiccan witch.  According to the Wiccans, the image of the Witch has been mistakenly associated with evil for hundreds of years.  Witches are, on the contrary, healers and protectors of the earth, honoring and respecting all life.  Sadly, the Salem witch trials revealed no such positive view.  We honor Rececca Nurse and all the others who were unjustly accused and persecuted during this time of hysteria and intolerance.
- Margaret Wakeley

It began early 1692 in the town of Salem, Massachusetts, with a circle of young girls who liked to meet in the forest and dabble in charms and potions.  When some of them began exhibiting strange symptoms of mania, doctors and divines of the town suspected the Devil’s handwork.  Their suspicions were confirmed when first one, then another, and finally the whole coterie of these girls began identifying witches and wizards among their neighbors.  In lurid detail, they described terrifying visitations by “spectral images” who inflicted various physical and mental torments on their victims and who bid them cast away their souls and sign their names in the Devil’s Book.

In Puritan New England, where fear of the Devil was as palpable as the fear of God, such charges were taken with the utmost seriousness.  Even those who might stumble over the Ten Commandments could easily recite the fearsome words of scripture, “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”

For most of a year the search for and discovery of witches among the denizens of Salem was like a raging storm.  Over a hundred men and women were arrested and imprisoned.  Twenty in all were put to death, while another eight perished in jail.  In virtually all these cases the verdict rested on so-called “spectral evidence,” the claim – impossible to verify or disprove – that the Devil had assumed a witch’s “shape” in order to haunt some righteous soul.  Everyone accepted, as an article of faith, that it was only by a witch’s consent that the Devil could assume her appearance.

The trials were conducted in the presence of the “afflicted children,” who would cry out and shriek, as if under some phantasmal attack, whenever any doubt was expressed as to their credibility.  While most of the defendants protested their innocence, a sufficient number saved their lives by “confessing” their guilt and pointing an accusing finger toward other “unrepentant” confederates.  Such confessions helped fuel the flames.

It was an especially troubling development when charges were leveled against persons of pious reputation.  Notable among these was Rebecca Nurse, a seventy-one-year-old wife and mother of eight, widely known for her faith, her charity toward all, and her simple goodness. It is notable evidence of her character that thirty-nine prominent members of the community, at considerable risk to their own safety and reputation, signed a petition on her behalf.

A deposition by two of her neighbors described how they had gone to visit Rebecca soon after the first accusations were leveled against her.  Rebecca reportedly “grieved” for the poor girls and “pitied them with all her heart and went to God for them,” though she was troubled by the belief that some of the accused were “as innocent as she was.”  When she learned that she herself had been named by the girls, she exclaimed, “I am as innocent as the child unborn.”

Even the magistrate who first interrogated Rebecca on March 24 seemed skeptical of the charges, repeatedly asking the accusers if they could be certain that it was Goody Nurse who had tormented them. The charges, however, were particularly serious.  One of her accusers claimed to have been visited by the spirits of babies whom Rebecca Nurse had supposedly murdered.  Whenever the judge wavered in his attitude, the girls would scream and faint.  When Nurse, attempting in vain to speak in her own defense, extended her hands, the girls were seemingly compelled to mimic her actions.

In the face of these theatrics, the judge wondered that Rebecca could retain her composure.  “You do not know my heart,” she whispered.  When he urged her to confess and “give glory to God,” Rebecca answered, “Would you have me belie myself?”

Astonishingly, the jury hearing Nurse’s case on June 30 at first returned a verdict of not guilty.  This provoked such an uproar from the audience – both from the “afflicted” girls and the spectators – that the chief justice enjoined the jury to retire and think again.  Upon further deliberation, they returned a guilty verdict, and Nurse was sentenced to death.

After being publicly excommunicated from her church, “abandoned to the devil and eternally damned,” Rebecca Nurse was hanged on Gallow’s Hill with four other women on July 19.  Their bodies were cast in a shallow grave.  But later, in darkness, Rebecca’s children removed her body and buried her in a secret location.

Eventually the fire in Salem ran its course.  After some months people grew weary of the drama, with its ever-widening net, and the flimsy evidence that had sent so many people to their deaths.  And then, in private shame, they began to confront the horror of what they had done.

Particular discredit fell to the theologians and ministers of the gospel who had proudly, and with so little mercy, arrayed themselves as God’s agents in this cosmic battle:  How they had hectored and harried their victims, cleaving wives and mothers from their husbands and children; how they had favored the frenzy of disturbed children over the faithful witness of a Rebecca Nurse; how, when George Burroughs, a former minister of the town, was hanged as a wizard, they had urged the crowd to close their ears against his “blasphemous” recitation of the Lord’s Prayer.

All this would be remembered.  And so would Rebecca Nurse.  In 1712 her excommunication was formally lifted.  The poet John Greenleaf Whittier later supplied this epitaph for her unmarked grave:

          O Christian Martyr who for truth could die              
          When all around thee owned the hideous lie!
          The world redeemed from superstition’s sway            
          Is breathing freer for thy sake today.

Additional Resources
See: Marion L. Starkey, The Devil in Massachusetts (New York:  Doubleday, 1969)