A Massachusetts town whose witch trials of 1692 cast a long shadow over the archive. In 1689, Samuel Parris moved there from Boston. That was the year Mather's account of the Goodwin children appeared in print, and in 1692 the behaviour it described reappeared at Salem. The same summer, as the trials were under way, Gloucester faced its Spectre Leaguers, an alarm some call a precursor to Salem. Its echo reached Ireland too. In the Islandmagee case of 1710, historian Andrew Sneddon argues Mary Dunbar learned her part from printed accounts of Salem.
Stories5