One freezing day in January of , something strange happened inside the Parris household of Salem Village, Massachusetts. As sleet and snow heaped higher outside their door, Betty Parris and her cousin Abigail began to twitch and twist their bodies into strange shapes, speaking in words that made no sense.
The pair had been bewitched. At the time, Salem Village was a small New England town populated mostly by Puritans, or religious individuals with a belief in the devil. The Puritan way of life was strict, and even small differences in behavior made people suspicious. When asked who had done this to them, Betty and Abigail blamed three townswomen, including Tituba, a Native American slave who worked in the Parris household.
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Tituba was known to have played fortune-telling games , which were strictly forbidden by the Puritans. The three women were thrown in jail to await trial for practicing witchcraft. During the trial, Tituba confessed to having seen the devil and also stated that there was a coven, or group, of witches in the Salem Village area.
Good and Osbourne insisted they were innocent. The punishment was hanging. As the weeks passed, other young girls claimed to have been infected by witchcraft too. They accused other townspeople of torturing them, and a few of the so-called witches on trial even named others as witches.
Women were not the only ones believed to be witchesβmen and children were accused too. By the end of the trials in , 24 people had died, some in jail but most by hanging.
