Free Witches: The Absolutely True Tale of Disaster in Salem by Rosalyn Schanzer Page B

wife, Elizabeth, died, but by then most of the townspeople had lost all sympathy for him. Forced out of his job in 1697, he finally left town, but his reputation preceded him. Though he remarried and had two more children, the only jobs he could find were in the impoverished little frontier towns of Stow, Concord, and Dunstable. He died in Sudbury in 1720.
    Betty Parris

    During the trials, Mrs. Parris had been worried sick about her daughter Betty’s fits and absolutely refused to keep using the child to find witches. Toward the end of March 1692, Reverend and Mrs. Parris sent Betty off to Salem Town to live with Stephen Sewall, * Parris’s distant cousin. Most of Betty’s symptoms stopped practically right away, but not all of them. One night, Betty told Mrs. Sewall that “the great Black Man came to her and told her if she would be ruled by him, she should have whatsoever she desired, and go to a Golden City.” New England Puritans believed that the Devil was dark skinned like the Indians. So Mrs. Sewall warned Betty that she had just seen the Devil “and he was a Lyar from the Beginning, and bid her tell him so, if he came again: which she did.” In 1710, Betty married Benjamin Baron of Sudbury. She was 27 years old. Baron was a yeoman farmer, a trader, and a shoemaker. The couple had four children, one boy and three girls. We still don’t know whether Betty was really sick from the dread disease back in 1692, though she was one of the two people who were most likely to have truly been ill. Did she ever admit, even to herself, the damage she had done when she testified against her slave Tituba and against her neighbors? We will never know.
    Abigail Williams

    Parris’s niece Abigail stopped giving testimony against the accused witches by June 1692, long before the trials ended. Nobody knows why she disappeared from the hearings, but Abigail is the other accuser who may actually have been sick. She never did fully recover from the fits she had suffered and was no older than 17 when she died.
    Ann Putnam Jr.

    When Ann was 19 years old, her parents died within two weeks of each other, and she was left alone to raise her nine brothers and sisters. Putnam never got married, but in 1706 when she was 29 years old, she asked to join the Salem Village Church. Always the peacemaker, Reverend Joseph Green offered his help. He guided her efforts to write an apology for lying in court, and he read it aloud in front of his congregation on August 25. Here’s a part of her confession:
    I desire to be humbled before God for that sad providence that befell my father’s family; that I then being in my childhood should be made an instrument for accusing severall persons of a grievous crime, whereby their lives were taken away. I now have good reason to believe they were innocent, and I justly fear I have been instrumental with others, though unwittingly, to bring upon myself the guilt of innocent blood; I can truly say before God, I did it not out of any anger or ill will; but was ignorantly deluded by Satan. And as I was a chief instrument of accusing of Goodwife Nurse and her two sisters, I desire to lye in the dust and be humbled for it, in that I was a cause, with others, of so sad a calamity; for which I earnestly beg forgiveness of God, and from all those unto whom I have given just cause of sorrow and offence.
    Putnam was only about 35 years old when she died.
    Mercy Lewis
    Mercy Lewis was still accusing people of being witches as late as January 1693. As she told it, one dark night when the moon slid behind the clouds, the spirit of Mary English had approached her to say the courts were about to free all the witches, so Mercy might as well become a witch, too, by signing the Devil’s book. That way, his witches would stop afflicting her with such terrible fits.
    Because Lewis was an orphan, she didn’t have a dowry to offer in marriage. She apparently did get married at about age 27 though, but not before she had an