The Afflicted Girls of the Salem Village Parsonage: Betty Parris and Abigail Williams (1692)

The Salem Village parsonage stood on Andover Street, in what is now Danvers, Massachusetts. It had two floors, four rooms and a stone-walled half-cellar. In the winter of 1691/92 it was home to Rev. Samuel Parris. His daughter Betty Parris was nine, and his niece Abigail Williams was eleven. Tituba and her husband John Indian, both enslaved, lived there too.

It began quietly. Betty grew forgetful and could not concentrate during prayer. Then she screamed at prayers, and barked like a dog when rebuked. Rev. John Hale of Beverly described the girls "bitten and pinched by invisible agents," their arms, necks and backs twisted in ways "impossible for them to do of themselves." The village physician, Dr William Griggs, found no natural illness. His diagnosis was the "Evil Hand."

About 25 February 1692. At the direction of a neighbour, Mary Sibley, Tituba and John Indian baked a cake of rye meal with the children's water and gave it to the dog. Soon afterwards the afflicted began naming the people they saw in their fits. Warrants went out for Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne and Tituba. From 1 March, magistrates John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin examined them. Tituba confessed.

19 March 1692. Evening. Rev. Deodat Lawson stood inside the parsonage and watched Abigail. She was "hurried with Violence to and fro in the room," stretching her arms as high as she could, crying "whish, whish, whish." She said Goodwife Nurse was offering her a book. "I wont, I wont, I wont, take it." Then she ran to the fire and threw firebrands about the house, running at the hearth "as if she would run up Chimney."

The next day, in the meeting house, she cried out: "Look where Goodw. C sits on the Beam suckling her Yellow bird betwixt her fingers!" Lawson counted about ten afflicted by then, Ann Putnam Jr. among them. Only they could see the shapes.

The Court of Oyer and Terminer opened on 27 May 1692 and admitted spectral evidence. Abigail named about 57 people and testified against 8, including Rebecca Nurse and John and Elizabeth Proctor. After 3 June she vanishes from the record. Betty never testified. Sent to Stephen Sewall's household in Salem Town, she recovered.

In October, Increase Mather wrote: "It were better that Ten Suspected Witches should escape, than that one Innocent Person should be Condemned." On 29 October Governor Phips stopped further arrests. More than 150 people had been accused. Nineteen were hanged, one was pressed to death, and five died in jail. In 1706 Ann Putnam Jr. called it "a great delusion of Satan that deceived me."

Parris himself later conceded that the Devil "deludes the senses of the afflicted." Bernard Rosenthal argued some of the afflicted must have been faking. Chadwick Hansen saw real hysteria, not fraud. Linnda Caporael proposed ergot poisoning in 1976, and Spanos and Gottlieb rebutted her the same year.

Others point to encephalitis lethargica, mass psychogenic illness, or the trauma of the Wabanaki wars. The fits mirrored the Goodwin children of Boston in 1688.

In 1970 Richard B. Trask and Roland Robbins excavated the parsonage foundations. The Town of Danvers bought the site in 1988. It is reached by a cart path beside 67 Centre Street.