Read Online Witches: The Absolutely True Tale of Disaster in Salem by Rosalyn Schanzer - Free Book Online

known as peine forte et dure . This meant that the prisoner would be forced to lie down on his back while more and more weight was piled on top of him until he either agreed to be questioned in court, confessed, or died.
    On Monday, September 19, Cory was stripped naked and a big board was set down on top of his chest. Then, as the townsfolk stared, a large number of extremely heavy rocks were piled one by one onto the board. Cory had only one thing to say; he asked to have more weight added so that he could die faster. But it would take two long days for him to breathe his last. Calef, the spectator who had written about Burroughs’s hanging, reported a horrible little detail about Cory: “His tongue being forced out of his mouth, the Sheriff with his Cane forced it in again when he was dying. He was the first in New England that was ever pressed to death.”
    Cory was buried in an unmarked grave by Butts Brook as if he were a suicide. But some people were greatly upset about the way he had died. Public opposition to the witchcraft trials began to pick up speed.
     
    T hursday, September 22, turned out to be the last time anyone would hang on Gallows Hill, but nobody knew it yet. The final victims of the witch hunt were:
     
    MARY EASTY
    MARTHA CORY
    MARGARET SCOTT
    ALICE PARKER
    ANN PUDEATOR
    WILMOTT REDD
    MARY PARKER
    SAMUEL WARDWELL
     
    All eight prisoners were jammed into a single cart, which bumped its way uphill toward the gallows. The overburdened vehicle was so heavy that it got stuck in a rut and almost turned over. Rowdy spectators cried out that “the Devil hindered it.”
    And what were the last words of the condemned? Respectable Mary Easty, a highly intelligent mother of seven children and the sister of Rebecca Nurse, wrote a well-reasoned, humble petition to the governor and judges urging them to rethink their procedures and to stop condemning the innocent.
    I Petition to your honours not for my own life, for I know I must die, but with the hope that no more Innocent blood may be shed. I do not question that your honours work to the utmost of your Powers to uncover witchcraft and would not be guilty of Innocent blood for the world. But by my own Innocence I know you are working in the wrong way.
    The Lord knows that I shall honestly say at Heaven’s Tribunall seat that I know not the least thing of witchcraft. Therefore I cannot, I dare not lie and by so doing lose my own soul. I beg your honors not to deny this humble petition from a poor dying Innocent person and the Lord will bless your endeavors.
    Her plea went unheeded.
    What about the seven other people on the list? According to spectator Calef, “Martha Cory, protesting her innocency, concluded her life with an eminent prayer upon the ladder.” Her husband, Giles Cory, had been pressed to death just two days earlier. And Margaret Scott had been framed by rumors that a dying man said he would never be well as long as she lived. Then there was Alice Parker, who had been accused of bewitching a girl because the girl’s father wouldn’t mow her grass (Parker’s accuser, Mary Warren, received permission from Judge Stoughton to strike Parker for lying, but Warren had a dreadful fit instead).
    Ann Pudeator, the wealthiest person to hang, was accused of making a man fall out of a cherry tree and making ointments to use for sorcery. Wilmott Redd was a gruff, unpopular fisherman’s wife from Marblehead. Mary Parker had yelled at her husband for going to a tavern and had also been accused of bewitching a sick child. Parker insisted that she was accused because someone else had the same name as hers.
    Last came Samuel Wardwell, an eccentric carpenter, fortune-teller, and magician who had at first confessed that he was a wizard and then changed his mind and recanted. When Wardwell tried to declare his innocence on Gallows Hill, smoke from the hangman’s pipe set him to coughing. This prompted the afflicted girls to declare that “the Devil hindered him