![]() ![]() While there have been countless academic histories of the trials, “The Witches” is the first major commercial nonfiction book on the subject in decades. “As he could not be declared guilty of witchcraft, he was excommunicated as a suicide,” Stacy Schiff writes in “The Witches: Salem, 1692,” her haunting new book on the Salem witch trials. (Contrary to popular myth, none were burned.) One suspect refused to confess and was tortured to death, crushed slowly under rocks. Well over 100 men and women in the Massachusetts Bay Colony were accused of witchcraft and taken into custody. The ensuing hysteria that engulfed Salem, Mass., over nine months in 1692 is infamous. Within days, Abigail and Betty named three local women as their tormentors. She ordered a household servant to make a witch cake, mixing the girls’ urine into rye flour that was baked in embers, then fed to a dog, in an attempt to reveal who had bewitched them. ![]() Weeks later, a well-meaning neighbor hit on a solution. Friends and neighbors gathered in their house to pray and sing psalms. They howled, writhed, went rigid and spoke gibberish. ![]() ![]() Then Abigail Williams, 11, and her cousin Betty Parris, 9, complained of feeling pinches and bites. It started with a prickling sensation on their skin. ![]()
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