Q&A with Margo Burns, Salem Witch Hunt expert

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Margo Burns relies on reading original sources for her work on the Salem Witch-Hunt Trials

MANCHESTER, NH – Must be, has to be, the Season of the Witch. Manchester’s Margo Burns is a historian, researcher, writer, teacher, linguist, presenter, both in-person and on television, and an expert in the 1692 and 1693 witch hunt and trials around Salem Village, Mass. Oh, she’s also the 10th generation great-granddaughter of Rebecca Nurse, who was hanged as a witch at the age of 71 in Salem despite being a fully-covenanted member of the church.

“I’ll always look at primary sources,” Burns explained. “I want to know how we know what we know. There are so many misconceptions.”

To help clear up misconceptions, Burns was the Associate Editor and Project Manager for the book Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt (2009; Cambridge University Press). The hefty book took 12 contributors a decade to write.  Burns’ contributions were identification of handwriting, making a chronological arrangement of documents and designing a relational database. She’s currently at work on the first full-length biography of William Stoughton, the controversial magistrate of the Salem trials.

Burns has both a heated passion for research into original sources and an ability to share that research with a good dose of humor even with a subject as sobering as the Salem witch trials. Several of her NH Humanities Council presentations can be viewed on YouTube. Like Bill Nye, the Science Guy, just look for the bow tie.

Burns with Emmy-award winning actress Jean Smart preparing for an episode of the genealogy program Who Do You Think You Are?

Q: You’ve just started work on a biography of William Stoughton, the chief magistrate of the Salem witch trials. How did he influence the trials?

A: He ran them (chuckle). He was the one who decided what would be acceptable and what wouldn’t. He accepted the use of what is called spectral evidence. Only the afflicted could see the specters of the people who were afflicting them. My ancestor Rebecca Nurse was executed after the jury returned a not-guilty verdict in her case. Stoughton refused to accept it … It’s important to be able to get the fine details right. After a decade of doing that and reading everything anybody has written about the Salem witchcraft trials, at least at that point, I said, well, what do I do, now? It took me a long time to see what needed to be done. There are so many books that start out the same way: two little girls in the minister’s household had fits and they brought in the doctor and he said ‘witchcraft.’ That’s the standard story. A lot of people do that but a lot of people come at it from radical perspectives like Carol Karlsen, who did a feminist critique of the trials … I like to go down rabbit holes. I’m discovering that what people think they know about Stoughton is wrong. 

At New College, Oxford, researching Salem Witch Trial Magistrate William Stoughton

Q: Can you say a little bit more about spectral evidence?

A: For the witch to afflict someone the witch would send these invisible malevolent particles into the body of a person or animal. It’s called effluvia. The particles would emanate from the eyes of a supposed witch and would get into the body of the person or animal. That’s the way the witch could afflict them. They could control these things within their body … The afflicted person would see a specter of that person. Nobody else could see it. But they could see this specter coming to them and pinching them and things like that. So that’s the kind of magic they were doing. Very early on there were six or eight young girls who were claiming affliction and then naming people they could see as specters coming and afflicting them. Now, this wasn’t just taken for granted. It seems there were Biblical things. The devil could take the shape of an innocent person and this is known from the Witch of Endor. But Stoughton said ‘no,’ if you see the specter of someone, that person has given the devil permission to do this. 

Q: You’re the 10th generation great-granddaughter of Rebecca Nurse who was a fully covenanted member of the church. Why did she get hanged?

A: The first three people who were accused, Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne and Tituba [the Parris household slave, most likely from the Caribbean. Her accusers were Betty Parris (9) and her cousin Abigail Williams (11).] Good, Osbourne and Tituba could fall into that category of the usual suspects. ‘Somebody’s a witch. Yeah, I bet they’re the ones.’ But then they accused Martha Corey who was another fully covenanted member of the church and Rebecca Nurse. So when it switched there, typically magistrates would go ‘yeah, yeah, yeah. No, go away.’ But for some reason, the two magistrates who were taking the accusations from people said that’s okay and they brought Martha Corey and Rebecca Nurse in and interrogated them in front of everybody and the so-called afflicted girls were seeing their specters and shouting. It was credible to the magistrates and they kept the accused in custody.

Margo Burns in her Salem witch library.

Q: If Margo Burns could find the Holy Grail of things that she’s looking for, what would that be?

A:  Stoughton’s diaries. If there were a really thoughtful diary or an account by Stoughton. But I’m not going to find that…I don’t even know if the diaries ever existed. We don’t have letters. We don’t have diaries. We have nothin’! (chuckle). 

Q: Was it Stoughton’s charge, maybe you can tell who decided this: the way that it was set up, if you confessed and named one or two other witches you got clemency…

A: Nope again. This is another one of those things about how do we know what we know. No. It’s very common for people to say that. But when they say when people found out that if you confessed you wouldn’t be hanged, then people started confessing. The problem is that when you say ‘when this, then that,’ that means a timeline. Nobody’s been able to show me a timeline that proves that. So, when I realized that, I started going through and looking at all of the confessions, when they happened and who confessed, and what happened to them. There is no indication that the court, meaning Stoughton, was going to spare anybody, whether they confessed or not. ..I looked at it through the lens of present-day work by the Innocence Project and there’s a lot of work being done on why people confess falsely. They found that 25 percent of the people they were exonerating had actually given evidence against themselves, against their own self-interests. Now, why would that be? I leaned heavily on the work of Saul Kassin. He came out with a book last year called Duped: Why Innocent People Confess and Why We Believe Their Confessions. Why would people do this? There are a lot of strategies authorities, police officers and interrogators use. Part of it is to minimize what will happen to you. ‘C’mon, we won’t go so hard on you, just confess,’ or others are ‘If you don’t confess, we’re going to go harder on you.’ Those tactics are obvious in the records of the interrogations and also the accounts of the people who were pressured or coerced into confessing falsely. 

Q: Have you heard of conversion, and if so, do you think it played a part in the Salem events?

A: You may have heard about some teenage girls in upstate New York and apparently one of them started having little tics and the next thing you know, all the rest of them are having it. They can’t find any medical reason for it but it’s sort of a mass hysteria kind of thing. They can’t help it. It’s a psychological disorder. Very hard to manage and very hard to cure. It was in the news a lot when this was happening in New York. Katherine Howe has a book called Conversion. She’s very well versed in the Salem stuff. ..I can say two words to just about any parent that will make their skin crawl: head lice. The suggestibility that goes across and particularly with younger people. The suggestibility and also the positive reinforcement of the adults around them.