The Devil Came to Me

March 1, 1692: The Three Women, the Confession That Lit a Bonfire, and the Curse That Came True

(Affiliate disclosure: Some links on this blog may earn us a small commission at no cost to you. Every bit helps keep the lantern lit.)

“Tituba, what evil spirit have you familiarity with?” “None.” “Why do you hurt these children?” “I do not hurt them.” — Examination of Tituba, Salem Village Meeting House, March 1, 1692

On the morning of March 1st, 1692, three women were brought before magistrates John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin in the meeting house of Salem Village, Massachusetts. The building was packed. Word had spread quickly. The accused were Sarah Good, a pregnant beggar who wandered Salem’s streets muttering under her breath and was broadly disliked; Sarah Osborne, an elderly woman who had scandalized the village by living with a man before marrying him and had not attended church in over a year; and Tituba, an enslaved Indigenous woman from the household of the Reverend Samuel Parris, who had cared for his daughter Betty and his niece Abigail — the very girls whose convulsions had set this whole catastrophe in motion.

The two Sarahs denied everything. Flatly, firmly, indignantly. They were innocent and they said so. It made no difference. What happened next — what Tituba did in that crowded meeting house, under duress, with her enslaver watching from the room — would determine the fate of more than a hundred and fifty people and end with nineteen of them dead.

Three Women Without Protectors

To understand why these three women were in that room, you need to understand one simple mechanism of Puritan Salem: the easiest targets were those who had no man standing between them and accusation.

Sarah Good’s life had been a long, grinding catastrophe. Born in 1653 to a prosperous innkeeper in Wenham, she had watched her inheritance evaporate through a combination of her father’s suicide, a contested estate, a first husband who died leaving nothing but debt, and a second husband — William Good, a laborer — who could barely support the family. By 1692 she was pregnant, homeless, and reduced to begging door to door in the village, sometimes muttering as she left houses that had turned her away. That muttering would be cited as evidence of cursing. Her own husband testified against her. “She is an enemy to all good,” he told the court. Even her four-year-old daughter Dorcas would eventually be arrested, imprisoned, and broken by the experience. Dorcas survived but was left, by her father’s later testimony, permanently damaged in her mind by what Salem did to her.

Sarah Osborne had committed the unforgivable Puritan sin of independent domestic arrangements. She had cohabited with her future husband before marriage, had been in a legal dispute over her first husband’s will, and had absented herself from church services for over a year — which, in a community where church attendance was both civic duty and spiritual obligation, was as suspicious as any confession. She would never see the outside of a prison again. She died in the Boston jail on May 10th, 1692, before she could be tried.

Tituba’s vulnerability was of a different and more brutal kind. As an enslaved Indigenous woman — most likely of South American Arawak descent, brought to Barbados before being purchased by Parris, though the details of her origins remain contested by historians — she had no legal standing, no community allies, and an enslaver who had already begun beating her to force a confession. She was the most visible Other in a community that was looking for someone to blame. She would also, in the end, be the only one of the three who survived.

The Confession That Changed Everything

The examination began with Hathorne’s blunt interrogation. Good and Osborne denied the charges without elaboration. Then came Tituba’s turn. And Tituba, whether from fear, from calculation, from the psychological aftermath of being beaten by Parris, or from some combination of all three, did something that nobody in that room expected: she confessed. Not with a simple admission, but with an astonishing, elaborate, theatrical performance that gave the assembled Puritans everything their theology had prepared them to fear.

“The devil came to me and bid me serve him.” — Tituba, Salem Village, March 1, 1692

The confession poured out of her in waves. A tall, white-haired man in a dark coat from Boston had appeared to her, she said, and demanded she hurt the children. If she refused, he threatened her with death. She described his animal servants in hallucinatory detail: a hog, a great black dog, a red cat, a black cat, a yellow bird, and a hairy creature that walked on two legs. She added a creature with wings, two legs, and a head like a woman. She described riding through the night on sticks with Good and Osborne. She claimed the Devil had struck her blind at one point during her testimony. She said there were other witches in Boston whose names she did not know.

Then, most devastatingly, she implicated her two co-defendants. “Sarah Good and Osburne would have me hurt the children but I would not,” she told the court. “No — there is four women and one man. They hurt the children and then lay all upon me and they tell me if I will not hurt the children they will hurt me.”

The room exploded. Here was the confirmation the community had been dreading and, in some dark sense, wanting: not one witch but a coven. Not a local problem but a Satanic conspiracy. The occult historian Elaine G. Breslaw would later write that Tituba’s testimony provided the essential legal evidence required to begin the process of communal exorcism — the confirmation that Salem was under organised diabolical attack and that the search for witches must be widened. It was, Breslaw argues, the single testimony that launched the trials in earnest.

Why did Tituba confess? Historians have debated this for three centuries. The most compelling reading is that she was not naive about her situation. She understood that the two white Sarahs had denied everything and were being taken to prison regardless. She understood that her race and her status had already made her guilty in the community’s eyes before she spoke a word. What confession offered, that denial did not, was this: those who confessed in Salem and named other witches were, by Puritan theological logic, spared execution — their punishment, it was reasoned, would come from God in His own time. Those who maintained their innocence were tried, convicted, and hanged. Tituba confessed. She survived. She was eventually sold for the price of her jail fees to an unknown buyer. She and her husband John were never heard from again.

What Happened at the Meeting House

The orthodox historical explanation for the Salem panic is mass hysteria — a community already primed by smallpox epidemics, political instability, economic anxiety, tensions with nearby Indigenous peoples, and the peculiar psychological pressure-cooker of Puritan theology, which located the Devil as an active, immediate, daily presence in the world. Into this tinder box, two girls threw a spark.

The most interesting scientific challenge to this interpretation is the ergot theory, proposed by historian Linnda Caporael in 1976. Claviceps purpurea is a fungus that infects rye grain under specific conditions of cold winters followed by warm, damp springs. When baked into bread, ergot produces mycotoxins that cause precisely the symptoms Betty Parris and Abigail Williams displayed: convulsions, hallucinations, the sensation of being pricked and bitten, altered states of consciousness. Salem Village grew rye. The winter of 1691–92 had been particularly cold. The spring was wet. The afflictions were concentrated in the western part of the village, near the marshy areas where ergot contamination was most likely. When the trials ended and the community scattered, the afflictions stopped. Not all historians accept the ergot theory, and it has its scholarly critics, but it remains the most materially grounded explanation for why those specific girls, in that specific place, in that specific season, began convulsing.

There is a third explanation, less empirical but no less worth considering for a publication like this one. The Puritan theological framework that governed Salem understood the universe as a battleground between cosmic forces, in which spectral evidence — the testimony of afflicted witnesses that they had seen and been attacked by the spectre of an accused person — was admissible in court because it was understood as literally true. The Devil could take the form of a living person. The spectre could torment without the person’s knowledge or consent. This doctrine, endorsed by Cotton Mather, the most influential Puritan minister in Massachusetts, transformed every anxious vision and every bad dream into courtroom evidence. It was the doctrine that made the trials possible. And it was, when it was finally challenged by the colony’s own clergy — who began to argue that the Devil might equally take the form of an innocent person to cause mischief — the doctrine whose collapse ended them.

The Cascade

Between March 1st and October 29th, 1692, when Governor William Phips finally dissolved the Court of Oyer and Terminer, Salem’s machinery of accusation and execution ran without stopping. More than 150 men and women were imprisoned. Nineteen were hanged on Gallows Hill — fourteen women and five men. One man, the eighty-year-old farmer Giles Corey, refused to enter a plea at all, knowing that a plea would subject his estate to forfeiture. The authorities responded by pressing him to death under an increasing weight of stones, the ancient English punishment for refusing to plead. His last words, as the stones were added, were reportedly “More weight.” He died after two days. His estate passed intact to his heirs.

Others died in prison before trial, including Sarah Osborne. The infant born to Sarah Good in her jail cell died before its mother was brought to the gallows. The accusation engine accelerated through the summer, reaching into increasingly prominent families, until it finally accused the wife of the governor himself — at which point Phips moved to shut it down.

The last mass execution, on September 22nd, 1692, drew Reverend Nicholas Noyes to the foot of the gallows, where eight people were hanged simultaneously. Noyes looked up at the swinging bodies and is reported to have said: “What a sad thing it is to see eight firebrands of Hell hanging there.”

The Curse and Its Fulfilment

On July 19th, 1692, Sarah Good was led to Proctor’s Ledge. She was the third of five women hanged that day. Reverend Noyes stood at the scaffold and urged her, one final time, to confess and save her soul. She had denied her guilt from the first day of her examination and she denied it now, four months later, at the end.

“I am no more a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take away my life, God will give you blood to drink.” — Sarah Good, Proctor’s Ledge, July 19, 1692

Whether these were precisely her words is historically uncertain — they do not appear in any contemporary account of the execution and were recorded later in oral tradition. What is documented is that she maintained her innocence with the same defiant fury she had shown throughout. The curse, in whatever form it was spoken, passed into Salem’s collective memory immediately.

Twenty-five years later, in 1717, Reverend Nicholas Noyes died of an internal hemorrhage. According to the accounts that accumulated around his death, it was a particularly ugly end: he choked on his own blood. Whether this was a ruptured aorta, as some medical historians suggest, or a brain hemorrhage, as others believe, the manner of his dying — a man drowning internally in his own blood — mapped onto Sarah Good’s words with the precision that only legend achieves. Noyes, notably, was not among the signatories of the various documents of apology and contrition that other participants in the trials produced in subsequent years. He never apologized. The dead woman’s curse, in the community’s telling, was the justice that the courts had not provided.

Nathaniel Hawthorne knew this story. His novel The House of the Seven Gables (1851), set in Salem and haunted by the sins of a witchcraft-era judge, opens with exactly this motif: a wrongfully condemned man cursing his accuser at the scaffold with the words “God will give him blood to drink.” Hawthorne’s great-great-grandfather had been one of the Salem judges. The guilt, the curse, and the blood were part of his inheritance. He added the extra w to his family name in part to distance himself from that inheritance.

The Legacy of the Trials

The Salem Witch Trials ended, but they did not leave quietly. Their legal and cultural legacy runs deeper than most Americans realize. The historian George Lincoln Burr wrote that “the Salem witchcraft was the rock on which the theocracy shattered” — that the collapse of the spectral evidence doctrine and the public reckonings that followed fatally undermined the Puritan theocratic project in Massachusetts. The Puritan vision of a New Jerusalem governed by ministers and magistrates in God’s name did not survive what it had done to its own people.

The procedural reforms that emerged from the crisis contributed, in slow and indirect ways, to the development of modern American legal principles: the right to legal representation, the right to cross-examine one’s accusers, the presumption of innocence rather than guilt. These are not trivial inheritances. They were built, at least partly, on the graves at Proctor’s Ledge.

In 1711, the Massachusetts legislature passed legislation reversing the convictions and restoring the names of the accused. In 1957, Massachusetts formally apologized. In 2001, the final five names — those the 1711 legislation had missed — were officially cleared. It took three hundred and nine years to complete the legal rehabilitation of the people Salem killed.

Arthur Miller understood intuitively what the trials were and what they would always be. When he wrote The Crucible in 1953, as a direct response to the McCarthyite red scare and the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, he was not merely drawing a convenient historical parallel. He was identifying a recurring structure in American public life: the moment when fear becomes permission, when accusation becomes evidence, when the community’s need to expel its own anxiety overrides its capacity for justice. The mechanism does not require 1692 theology to function. It requires only sufficient fear and sufficient willingness to look away from what is being done in fear’s name.

The Three Women

History remembers March 1st, 1692 primarily as the beginning of the Salem Witch Trials. The Modern Occultist prefers to remember it as the morning three specific women were brought into a meeting house and asked to account for themselves before a community that had already decided what they were.

Sarah Osborne died in a Boston jail eleven weeks after that morning, without trial, without justice, without anyone to stand for her. Sarah Good died on a July gallows, pregnant once, the mother of a broken child and a dead infant, cursing her accuser with words that outlasted him by centuries. Tituba survived — the one who confessed, the one who named names, the one who gave the court the story it needed — and disappeared from the historical record entirely after her release. Nobody knows what happened to her. Nobody knows where she is buried, or whether she was ever buried at all.

What we know is that on the morning of March 1st, 1692, before the first question was asked, all three of them were already guilty. They were guilty of being without protection. They were guilty of being marginal, eccentric, inconvenient, or simply Other in a community that had run out of patience with ambiguity. The trials that followed were not an aberration from the logic of that community. They were its logical conclusion.

“You are a liar. I am no more a witch than you are a wizard.” — Sarah Good. She was right.

FURTHER READING

Elaine G. Breslaw’s Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem (1996) is the definitive biography of the most enigmatic figure in the trials. Mary Beth Norton’s In the Devil’s Snare (2002) situates the trials in the context of the ongoing frontier wars with Indigenous peoples and makes a compelling case that the political terror of the borderlands fed directly into the village hysteria. Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum’s Salem Possessed (1974) remains the essential sociological reading. For the ergot theory in its full development, Linnda Caporael’s original 1976 paper in Science, “Ergotism: The Satan Loosed in Salem?,” is available online. The full transcripts of the examinations, including Tituba’s confession in her own words, are held in the Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive at the University of Virginia.

(Every day, Modern Occultist News will present "This Day in Occult History" and will dive into the birthdays, rituals, breakthroughs, and crucial moments that shaped today's many esoteric traditions. From the Hermetic revival to Witchcraft, from Crowley to cyberspace, we'll bring the best stories and latest trends to today's own modern occultists everywhere.)

Modern Occultist