HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Lo! Tis a gala night within the lonesome latter years! An angel throng, bewinged, bedight in veils and drowned in tears, sit in a theatre to see a play of hopes and fears while the orchestra breathes fitfully the music of the spheres. (evil laughter)
BEN KISSEL
Welcome to the Last Podcast on the Left everyone. I am Ben hanging out with Henry and hanging out with Marcus for the 500th time!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah dude.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh my god, we've hung out so many more times than 500. Oh god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's probably like episode 615 if you count all the Side Stories but you can really feel the 500 on this one.
BEN KISSEL
Episode 500. It's been a wonderful journey and I'm happy to have shared it with both of you and of course with this fantastic audience.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And to open 500 up, Kissel do you think that if Snoop Dogg was around during this time period that he would have called himself the Bitchfinder General?
BEN KISSEL
Whoa! All right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Come on, that'd be fun today.
MARCUS PARKS
Come on.
BEN KISSEL
Folks, What are we talking about? The Salem Witch Trials!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's finally here!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
It has begun.
MARCUS PARKS
Now while the Salem Witch Trials were by no means the most lethal in modern history, they certainly are the most famous. In 1692 a large swath of Massachusetts came to believe that a witch infestation orchestrated by the devil himself-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Devil. It's the devil!
BEN KISSEL
Whoa!
MARCUS PARKS
It's the devil!
BEN KISSEL
Oh no!
MARCUS PARKS
They believed that had taken hold in their colony.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And again we might not be the most deadly one, all right.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
America didn't make the most deadly one, we didn't kill witches by the hundreds like they did in Europe.
BEN KISSEL
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But we did it with style.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely. And of course if the devil is going to go anywhere, it'll be Massachusetts.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Man, don't tell that to the people that own Dunkin Donuts.
BEN KISSEL
Dunkies.
MARCUS PARKS
I thought you were gonna say the people of Georgia.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, no, no, no, that's right. Oh yeah. Oh yeah!
BEN KISSEL
No, the devil went down to Georgia.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah for vacation.
BEN KISSEL
He was living in Massachusetts.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And also the tax write-off for the film industry.
BEN KISSEL
Fantastic.
MARCUS PARKS
Well in the resulting fear and paranoia, 172 people would be accused of being in league with Satan.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Satan! Satan! Satan!
MARCUS PARKS
Of that number, 5 would die in jail awaiting trial or execution, 1 would be slowly crushed under rocks for refusing to participate in the proceedings, and 19 would be executed by hanging.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah man and it wasn't quick hanging.
MARCUS PARKS
No, we'll get into that later. It is bad, they did not know what they were doing. They did not test it like they did in England way back when with Jack Ketch and all that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And the big melons, they tied melons to see what the melons did to the rope.
BEN KISSEL
I have a weighted blanket and I'm just wondering if at one point they put one rock on that person and they're like if you stop now I could actually rest.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is incredible.
BEN KISSEL
This is actually 19 lbs of pressure and it's easing my anxiety.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
How heavy is your weighted blanket?
BEN KISSEL
It's really heavy and then I have my dogs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Man, you sleep under like 75 lbs.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, it's cool.
MARCUS PARKS
Now one of the things that made the Salem Witch Trials somewhat special was the fact that men and women, rich and poor, devout and disbelieving were all fair game for the hangman's noose. However that isn't to say that the majority of victims here were not the usual suspects.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Which is literally what they called them.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Those would be women, weird off-putting people nobody liked, and citizens who made morally questionable decisions.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
For the time period. Nowadays you'd see like that one woman purchased the indentured servant and then started fucking him for legal.
BEN KISSEL
Whoa, that aint right!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, its correct! It was love, love is correct.
BEN KISSEL
Oh.
MARCUS PARKS
It's in the context of times and of course stuff that we would still consider awful now where it's like he once beat a handyman to death.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's not good.
BEN KISSEL
Not at all.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Why'd you point at me?
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I love my handyman.
BEN KISSEL
Of course you do, you can't do anything on your own.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm completely unable to do anything in the home.
MARCUS PARKS
But along with that majority were community leaders, wealthy men, and even one reverend and they all hung from the branch of a tree on as legend has it Gallows Hill?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(witch voice) Yes. The most metal hill in all of the valley.
BEN KISSEL
It's not just a clever name.
MARCUS PARKS
What's important to remember about witch hunts during this time period though is that it took a lot more than one person pointing and screaming, 'Witch!'-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Witch!
MARCUS PARKS
To get the party started with a hunt or even a single trial. Rather witch hunts and witch trials didn't take off until the majority of the community agreed that witchcraft was afoot.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Things are fucked up. She's got a big hat.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Let's get her fucking ass. Oh, I saw a nipple through her shirt. String her up.
BEN KISSEL
Well I also think this was probably the first time anyone ever wore a boob inspector shirt.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well tits are the mark of the devil.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS
Well in Salem the community at large became convinced mostly but not solely due to the riveting performances of six girls known as the afflicted.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, they were like all the girls from Euphoria.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They do very well and I don't know who they are.
MARCUS PARKS
For a myriad of reasons that each had their own motivation, the afflicted testified that they were almost constantly being attacked by the specters of witches simply for evil's sake. And in the course of those attacks these girls also claimed to have gained secret knowledge of other evil deeds perpetrated by the Salem townsfolk.
BEN KISSEL
These are kind of cool chicks to be honest. They work at Hot Topic, they know all the nice stuff, they'll kiss you but they won't date you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I feel like they were more like robot servants within their own home because they were all children of puritan families that were basically created to be a workforce.
BEN KISSEL
Well they rebelled.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well this is the first time, well there's many, it's very complicated.
BEN KISSEL
Okay, we'll get into it.
MARCUS PARKS
It's very complicated, yeah. They were orphans, they were war refugees, they were all fucked up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They were all fucked up. As an historian?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. All fucked up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's all fucked.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
That's your professional medical advice? That's your opinion.
MARCUS PARKS
As a future history professor, come to my 9:30AM class 'All Fucked Up' with Professor Parks.
BEN KISSEL
I can't wait for you to freak out of those kids and throw an apple at somebody's head and get fired.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Nothing has ever been good!
MARCUS PARKS
Community members were accused of homicide, patricide, infanticide, inducing suicide, and multiple counts of serious assault all in the service of the devil or for their own selfish wants and needs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The devil's just a middleman, all right. He's trying to help you out here, right.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
When it comes down to it. I also find it's really, really apparently very difficult for the devil to get anybody to put anything in writing because he is sort of like a timeshare salesman.
BEN KISSEL
Well there's a little bit of trust with the deal with the devil. A handshake should do it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, you're supposed to kiss his literal asshole.
BEN KISSEL
Is that right?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's one of the ceremonies.
MARCUS PARKS
That was more of a European thing though.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, I saw some asshole kissing in some of the descriptions. Maybe I'm looking for it but it did feel like I saw a couple because you're supposed to kiss the rump of the goat.
BEN KISSEL
All right.
MARCUS PARKS
But to that point Henry, there were never any sexual allegations leveled.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, they're not horny enough.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And despite the devil's supposed hornyness, sex of any kind was never mentioned at any point during the trials, with rare very vague exceptions.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
For me that kind of points to the fact that they were kind of making it up as they were going because they couldn't even make up horny shit to lie about.
MARCUS PARKS
They had no point of reference for horny shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah because they weren't doing anything, they weren't scissoring as far as I know.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I mean I'm certain every once in while they got a funny feeling on a horse.
BEN KISSEL
Oh, of course.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then all of a sudden you realize but the horse also has the balls in the back between his trunk and his front and I shall use the balls herewith my pleasure.
BEN KISSEL
Oh I'm sure, sometimes you gotta fart, it sneaks in, you get aroused. I mean there's a series of different ways the person can orgasm.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well just sit like this. Just sit like this because it's a long series ahead of us. This is just the very beginning. You're not even done with the intro wrap up.
MARCUS PARKS
Not at all. But lest ye think that Salem was just a bunch of wacky religious American nuts going off on a tear like they always do-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(screaming) I'm gonna kill you both! I'm gonna kill you fucking both!
MARCUS PARKS
The Witch Hunt of 1692 was nothing compared to what went on in Europe both before and after the trials in Massachusetts. While the 25 killed in Salem marked those witch hunts as the deadliest in American history, 2000 people were executed for witchcraft in Cologne, Germany half a century before Salem.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Honestly I feel bad for the gallows construction guys because it's great to have so much work but at the same time where's the you time?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
It's exhausting. Didn't have that on my half century before 1692 bingo card.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Fine.
MARCUS PARKS
Well in Europe they liked to burn the witches. So it's more like it's the lumber man, he's the one doesn't get the rest.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Why do you think, I'm certain there actually is an answer but I don't know the answer, why did they prefer burning to our hanging?
MARCUS PARKS
That is an answer I do not know, I guess it's just a cultural thing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We wouldn't understand.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We'll read into that, maybe for next week we can have that answer.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, I'd like that. Yeah. Once we start getting to the executions in Salem we'll go through a few witch executions in history and see really what are the differences between the different cultures.
BEN KISSEL
All right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He got excited. It's like going to Epcot.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
If you really did believe that they were possessed by the devil, I think burning out the devil would make more sense than hanging perhaps.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Or they double suited it where it's also real cold. A lot of witch practice and a lot of witch accusations and trials come around wintertime.
BEN KISSEL
There you go! All right.
MARCUS PARKS
But starting 20 years after Salem 800 people were executed for witchcraft in Hungary over the course of four decades. That is a 40 year long witch hunt.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It sounds more like Hangry.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's funny.
BEN KISSEL
It is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That is funny.
MARCUS PARKS
It's funny. I laughed, you got me.
BEN KISSEL
If you say something and then say it's funny afterwards, that means that was funny.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's funny.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Well some of those in Hungary were killed by torture, some were killed by being burnt at the stake, and some were drowned during the sink or swim test. You're familiar with that, right Ben?
BEN KISSEL
Of course. If you drown you're not a witch. Wait, if you survive you're a witch and if you drowned you don't. So basically you're fucked.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They swim. The mark of Satan is upon them. They must hang!
BEN KISSEL
What do you guys want? Drowning, fire, or hanging?
MARCUS PARKS
Drowning.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Drowning.
BEN KISSEL
Drowning?
MARCUS PARKS
Absolutely, absolutely.
BEN KISSEL
I think I would go with fire because don't you just inhale really fast and then you pass out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You scream a lot, it hurts.
BEN KISSEL
You do?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
There's a lot of pain. Your feet are definitely going to be blackened.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it's gonna be bad. That's going to be bad. And everyone's watching.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Where at least when I'm drowning it's like I'm dying by myself even though people are watching from the surface.
BEN KISSEL
And in a way aren't you back in Mother Earth's womb?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'd just pretend I was that baby from Nevermind. Go full dick out. I'd piss hard.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah you would.
MARCUS PARKS
But to give you a scale of how hard and fast the accusations took hold in Salem, there were only 120 people accused of witchcraft in England in the 50 odd years before Salem. And of those only 17 were executed. By contrast, the Salem Witch Trials would surpass both of those numbers in less than a year.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Which is why it truly is, how do put it, it was out of fashion in Europe already technically, right. Like they had the Hungarian burned down.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean the last witches in England were executed like five years before this.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But it was still the aristocrats would be like, 'Ugh.' You know what I mean? If they heard it they'd be like, 'Oh, you still doing that?' They'd do that type of thing.
BEN KISSEL
Right. We're over it. Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But in America they kind of got it all done in one go. They were like okay, this is our turn, we're gonna rip this up. Again capitalism, it's all about bang for your buck.
MARCUS PARKS
Yep.
BEN KISSEL
Well it seems like the vast majority, if they're accused of being a witch, the vast majority aren't killed. It seems like they couldn't get out of jury duty. You gotta figure out how to get out of this.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well a lot of it is you better be careful where you go when you're invited to anything in 1692 and if you've done anything that makes anybody upset because a lot of them were like, 'Come meet us at the tavern!'
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're a fucking witch now.
BEN KISSEL
What?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What?
BEN KISSEL
Dang it.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the problem with that is that yeah, if you've done anything to anybody you might get accused of being a witch. But as we'll get into with Salem, everybody had done everything to everyone.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cause it's a small town!
BEN KISSEL
Small town.
MARCUS PARKS
So everyone was pissed off at each other at all times. So the fucking witch accusations got tossed around willy nilly. But we'll get to that later.
BEN KISSEL
Awesome.
MARCUS PARKS
Now at the center of pretty much every witch hunt is the idea that Satan is real, working not just in spirit but in the physical as well. In short, Satan was an entity as consequential to everyone's daily lives as the weather. And considering how many people died as a result of this belief, they might as well have been right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But I mean that's how you make something real.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You just transmute it. It's kind of what the internet has done in its own subconscious way where things start on the internet and then can pop into real life much like QAnon.
MARCUS PARKS
Yep.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely. The satanic panic, it's back, it's stronger than ever perhaps.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is.
MARCUS PARKS
The devil, as he was often referred to then, was an all powerful being who was greatly feared as an enemy of all that was good. While the devil was not blamed for every bad thing that happened, he could be blamed without question in everything from a stubborn ox to the death of a child.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If you believe some theo-leo-gians, theo-law-gee-ans?
BEN KISSEL
Something like that.
MARCUS PARKS
Theologians.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Theo-low-gians. If you believe some of those fucking morons, right-
BEN KISSEL
Well perhaps, they study religion.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Might as well be an expert in Monopoly, it's the same thing, it's exactly the same.
BEN KISSEL
Well it's quite interesting given human history.
MARCUS PARKS
It's a cultural thing, it's very important.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh I wouldn't understand?
BEN KISSEL
It guides human actions, so religion's important.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But the idea of the old god, the old gnostic idea of god or the original tribes view of god of the idea that it always kind of had a duality to it. And at some point the Christians understood packaging and creating teams. And that was split at some point where those sort of cruel aspects of god became a character known as the devil, whatever you wanted, the serpent, the goat, all that type of shit. Again Anton Lavey, the devils kept the church in business for all these years. It works great.
MARCUS PARKS
Yep.
BEN KISSEL
I suppose so. Perhaps the devil is so upset because he can't find shoes because you have to think of a hoof and and how difficult that would be.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hooves have shoes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
No, hooves don't have shoes.
MARCUS PARKS
But isn't a hoof a shoe of its own?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
No, that's like saying your toenail is a shoe.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There's a horseshoe that goes on a hoof.
BEN KISSEL
He's not a fucking horse though, is he? He's the devil.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But you can put a horseshoe on.
MARCUS PARKS
A goat shoe.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Do they call it a goat shoe?
MARCUS PARKS
No one puts them on goats. There's no reason for it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Why not?
MARCUS PARKS
Cause you don't ride it and it's not big enough.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I would.
BEN KISSEL
Let's get back to it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You stopped us.
BEN KISSEL
I know.
MARCUS PARKS
But in addition to the devil being a real presence, tangible magic was also considered to be real in both black and white forms. Black magic or maleficium as it was known was the province of those who paid allegiance to the devil, the witches of New England. And by the way witches could not do magic on their own, they merely asked the devil to do magic for them and then the devil would do magic because mortals were not able to do magic. That made mortals too powerful if you said that mortals could do magic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well that's also one of their validation points. That's one of these things how they would get a confession out of you. Like what the cops do where they go like, 'We're your friends, we can help you out.'
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
We're gonna help you out.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just come on our side. They would use those arguments to say like, 'You didn't do this, the devil did this. He just used your tits as little guns.' And then you have to understand. So it's the way they viewed it. They're really good at just changing whatever they're talking about to make it work for the present circumstance.
BEN KISSEL
Manipulation.
MARCUS PARKS
Well on the other side of the magic was everyone else, the people who practiced white magic also known as folk magic. In this one could summon with common household objects, you could use an egg, you could use hot nails, you could use a bible and a key.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I want to use the bible and the key.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean fuck all of it. I wanna make breakfast. As soon as you said eggs, honestly I'm starving.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And you can use it for any reason. You could use conjuring to summon lost objects, you can use it to discover suspected marital infidelities.
BEN KISSEL
Uh oh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But it was such a part of their life already, folk magic. We've talked about this when we did the mormonism series, it comes up again and again. It's weird because it was baked in, it was a part of their lives the idea that there were people that could do things that have a connection to the earth and then they just decide when it's a crime when they want it to be.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Because everyone practiced folk magic all throughout the puritan colonies, all of these people practiced it to some degree or another. But perhaps the most important function of white magic was battling black magic, which that gives you a sense of how every day in mundane this sort of thing was and how much magic was somewhat tolerated until things got out of hand.
BEN KISSEL
God, it sounds like if Pokemon was real. This is not mundane at all.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And also you gotta remember these people are leading boring lives of drudgery, so it adds spice to everything.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But what if Pokemon Go could get you fucking hung? This is the problem.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it is kind of fun and exciting and all of a sudden you're like, 'Oh I'm not a witch! Oh shit!'
MARCUS PARKS
Well it was believed that if someone was using black magic against you, your family, or your farm, that magic could be turned back on the witch by burning, boiling, or otherwise hurting a piece of what had been bewitched, like a lock of your sick child's hair if a witch is making your child sick, you cut off some hair and you burn it.
BEN KISSEL
That'll work.
MARCUS PARKS
Or if a witch has killed your sow, killed your pig, you cut off its ear and you stab the ear over and over and over again.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah dude.
BEN KISSEL
That was not my pig, that was my goddamn girlfriend.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Fractals bro. All right? You want to talk about some fucking fractals, dude? I tried a bunch of our samples, so we're going to use fucking the Last Podcast weed this time, man. Fractals.
BEN KISSEL
Fractals. Okay, fantastic.
MARCUS PARKS
Did you actually study fractals or did you just say the word over and over again because it's a fun word to say when you're high?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We all are just fractals.
BEN KISSEL
Fractals. Where's my fucking pig?
MARCUS PARKS
Well things could even get physical in the battle between good and evil. One could confront a suspected witch directly and scratch him to draw a little bit of blood. And somehow if you scratch the suspected witch, that would somehow deactivate the magic. If you drew blood though.
BEN KISSEL
I do want to point out you said 'him' and that was an interesting thing that I learned in the car with you, Marcus. It was not just women that were witches, it was also men.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He can learn.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes he can.
BEN KISSEL
Yes indeed.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, it's anybody who got the finger first.
MARCUS PARKS
Well in other words, during this time period damn near everyone during the 1600s in rural New England but especially Salem, they were kind of witchy, kind of weird, and very combative.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They were truly independent.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Independent in a way that allowed them to consume themselves like a snake eating its own tail.
MARCUS PARKS
Now as far as why witches gave themselves over to the devil, it's really not all that clear which to modern eyes makes the Salem Witch Trials all the more baffling. See instead of faustian bargains in which people sell their souls for great material wealth or status, the witches of 17th century New England supposedly signed temporary contracts with the devil in order to take revenge over petty grievances like property line disputes or arguments over how many fucking chickens you owe me.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
This is serious stuff.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well it's almost like they're making it up. Because a lot of times the people that have... There has been incidents of quote unquote "real" dark ceremonies, people working with the devil. But mostly I think it's about a change in lifestyle, especially back in the time period.
BEN KISSEL
Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There's something about you aligning yourself with this other idea, we'll cover one of them, one of our favorite ones of them, who just leaned into the witch thing, right.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think it's really about escape of a deeply misogynist culture, also bad for everybody. It was especially bad for women but it was bad for everybody, everybody was caught in this puritan fucking trap. And there's something about you kind of let yourself go nuts in a way, you kind of say like 'Yeah, I signed a deal with the devil and it was for this freedom.' It was like what they did in The Witch which I actually thought was really on the money with their like, 'Do you want to look deliciously?'
MARCUS PARKS
Fuck yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I do!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Where its all about that. It's more about don't you wanna smile?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Well speaking of delicious, did they have clam chowder yet? Because it is amazing. I had some in San Diego during Comic-Con.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Honestly you've been talking about clam chowder for years.
BEN KISSEL
I love clam chowder.
MARCUS PARKS
I also love clam chowder.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Where did clam chowder originate?
BEN KISSEL
You can't be that sad as a society.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
United States it says, it was here.
BEN KISSEL
1600s?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It says the first clam chowder, I'm having a fucking crisis here.
BEN KISSEL
Clam chowder!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The brief history of clam chowder, it says 1919.
BEN KISSEL
Okay, wow. Very new.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's the first document. Could have been invented in the 17th century. Now we're gonna get these fucking emails from the clam chowder society.
BEN KISSEL
I love the clam chowder people. But either way we can assume they did not have it then.
MARCUS PARKS
They did not have it. Absolutely not.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
But I think using the devil as a way to take revenge over petty grievances or at least accusing people of doing so, I think this is just a way for people to use witchcraft as a way to completely overblow the small, very human disagreements that come from living in a society. And this goes double when a society is going through growing pains much like colonial New England was in 1692.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Growing pains is a really friendly way to put it. It technically was in a massive downward spiral.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, which we'll get into. It is a mild way of putting it but yeah, it's a society going through transition, transition is scary. But put simply this was just another way for the people of New England to turn their own personal anger and frustration into a righteous war between good and evil. Which is what I think really lies at the heart of the Salem Witch Trials.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It doesn't sound like anything we know now. So that's why I'm glad that there's no modern ties.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS
No modern equivalent to that at all. Not even close.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But again we'll state up top it is very varied, there has been many books written on this subject and we have some, we've been reading and trying to get to the bottom of it. And this is going to be the Last Podcast version of what we think is at the center of the Salem Witch Trials.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Which everybody says something else.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, of course.
BEN KISSEL
So the books don't mention boob inspector shirts?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, no, no, no. That's what we bring to the conversation.
BEN KISSEL
Oh, I see. That's our spin.
MARCUS PARKS
But before we get into the why and how, let's acknowledge our sources for the series. First we've got the highly recommended book 'A Storm of Witchcraft' by Emerson W. Baker which nicely summarizes both the trials themselves and the possible historical causes for the whole kerfuffle.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know what I like about this guy too? Emerson, he's got the name of a guy who lives in a colonial Williamsburg hut on purpose.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And that's what I like, I like a historian to sound like a nerd.
BEN KISSEL
Emerson, I don't like the Catholic Church but I wouldn't mind if he's deeply Catholic.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
There's something about the name Emerson.
MARCUS PARKS
Emerson Baker?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well no, that's the problem. I tried to watch a new documentary about the puritans and it's just all like, 'Here's what they got right!' They don't say anything about everything that they got incorrect. And then looked at it and it was from a Christian like production company and stuff. And sometimes those sources are a little skewed.
BEN KISSEL
All right.
MARCUS PARKS
We've also got 'The Salem Witch Trials: A day by day chronicle of a community under siege' by Marilynne K. Roach. This one is for your hardcore Salemheads out there. This is the book for the ones who want every single detail of what went on. It is fascinating but goddamn is it dense.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Fascinating.
BEN KISSEL
All right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You know what book I was reading that I also really loved that helped me get sort of a vague understanding? I'm still reading and as we go throughout the series I'm gonna pontificate on it. It's called 'Europe's Inner Demons: The demonization of Christians and medieval Christendom' by Norman Cohn and it's really interesting to kind of see where all this might have come from.
BEN KISSEL
Well he definitely made an exciting story, that's the most boring title I've ever heard.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's fascinating!
BEN KISSEL
Fascinating.
MARCUS PARKS
So without further ado, let's get into the Salem Witch Trials starting with the question of what may have caused the whole affair. The answer to that question is of course a lot of shit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Get your shovels.
BEN KISSEL
Here we go.
MARCUS PARKS
Just like one could not point to one thing to explain the satanic panic of the 80s and 90s or the modern widespread belief of QAnon's satanic government kabal conspiracy, one cannot blame Salem on a single cause. Rather it was a myriad of causes, a perfect storm as it were.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
George Clooney.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Nice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Where's he in this?
MARCUS PARKS
Mark Wahlberg, also in that movie.
BEN KISSEL
A boat.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. This has got reasons ranging from something as mundane as bad weather to some of the bloodiest and brutal wars ever fought on these lands. But before we get into the real causes, let's go ahead and dispel one of the most famous and groovy myths of the Salem Witch Trials which admittedly we ourselves have been guilty at times of spreading.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well because it's one of those quick facts that you could just say real quick.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. That's super wrong.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(nerd voice) You know, actually... We've all done this.
BEN KISSEL
Is it the wheat?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Is this the wheat? Is that not real?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. It's not real, man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well there might be tiny bits of it.
MARCUS PARKS
Tiny. Now despite how awesome the 2015 classic The Witch made it look, the delusions and craziness that went down in New England in 1692 was not a result of ergot poisoning.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ergot poisoning.
BEN KISSEL
Ergot poisoning?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's not the erg-ert per-sern-ing.
BEN KISSEL
It's not the erg-ert per-sern-ing? I've been wrong about the ergot poisoning this whole time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Now see here, you try to crack me one more time about erg-ert per-sern-ing, I'm gonna come down and I'm gonna kill your merm and your derd.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my goodness, erg-ert pern-sern-ing.
MARCUS PARKS
See in 1976 in the post acid age it was suggested that many of the people in Salem accusing others of witchcraft had been suffering from convulsive ergotism.
BEN KISSEL
Erg-ert per-sern-ing? It was not erg-ert pern-sern-ing?
MARCUS PARKS
It was convulsive ergotism.
BEN KISSEL
It's erg-ert pern-sern-ing.
MARCUS PARKS
That was as a result of eating the ergot fungus that grows on damp cereal grains.
BEN KISSEL
The erg-ert pern-sern-ing. Episode 500. We're so professional now, we're not stupid.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
MARCUS PARKS
We're grown.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So, man, streamlined.
BEN KISSEL
The erg-ert pern-sern-ing.
MARCUS PARKS
Well in Salem that cereal grain would have been the communal rye that everyone ate from. And while ergot poisoning doesn't-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's hard to hear it now. It's hard to hear it without it. Call it EP or something.
MARCUS PARKS
I only have to say it like two or three more times.
BEN KISSEL
Great.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Okay, good.
MARCUS PARKS
But while ergot poisoning does indeed induce the sorts of trips one might have on acid, the descriptions we have of the afflicted don't include the other symptoms like neurological damage, gangrene, and near constant vomiting and diarrhea.
BEN KISSEL
Bro I am really fucking tripping off this ergot.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm tripping balls.
BEN KISSEL
Where'd you get this ergot, man? Cause I am fucking tripping balls.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I got it from Ergotson's.
BEN KISSEL
I'm done.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I love my hallucinogen community.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I love my mushroom people, love doing acid. But it is very high idea, being like, 'Maybe they're all just fucking tripping balls, man.'
BEN KISSEL
I thought that was sort of true.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We don't know but it's not the cause.
BEN KISSEL
I gotcha.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Additionally had the afflicted been exposed to ergot for the entirety of 1692, they would have suffered permanent dementia. To the contrary, most of these girls lived normal lives free of any kind of mental illness after the trials finally settled down.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, naturally, yeah. A bunch of mayhem happened and they all went, 'Well, now it's over. Okay.'
BEN KISSEL
Great, moving on.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Moving on.
MARCUS PARKS
Furthermore the entire communal supply of rye would have been infected with ergot and there are certainly more than a few people in Salem who said this shit is crazy While it was all going on.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, there were some not high people there.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But lastly and perhaps most importantly, the accusations were not just confined to Salem Village. No, they were not. As I briefly mentioned the witch hysteria infected multiple towns around Massachusetts. It even reached as far as Connecticut, 250 miles away as the crow flies.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it got a wee bit out of control. And you can tell how it got out of control by how quickly all the regional governments tried to cover it up.
MARCUS PARKS
Yep.
BEN KISSEL
Interesting.
MARCUS PARKS
And so now that we've got the easy answer out of the way, let's ask the questions everybody wants answered, namely how did this happen and why was it allowed to go on for so long?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because it was fun! And you got attention.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And you loved every minute of it.
BEN KISSEL
It must have been fun for someone at some point.
MARCUS PARKS
We'll get into that.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
As far as the questions go, I think the answer can be summed up in one sentence that can be applied to almost any witch hunt in history, small or large. I,n short life sucked and everything was hard.
BEN KISSEL
Gotchu.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And this was not even a time period where things were already generally hard.
BEN KISSEL
Right. And then imagine it actually being hard for incredibly difficult times.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
And this isn't Taco Bell taking away the Mexican pizza hard.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Don't even fucking bring that up to me.
BEN KISSEL
I mean that's what causes people to riot today.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I could barely read yesterday because of my chocolate tears. And honestly I do need to go to the doctor because I don't know why my tears are brown.
BEN KISSEL
I know, it's sad.
MARCUS PARKS
I could see the choco taco being a very cherished childhood memory to you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah man, I love that shit.
BEN KISSEL
That's a PSYOP by the way.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's literally the closest we got to Mexican food as children because my parents don't like spice.
BEN KISSEL
That's a choco taco PSYOP. They're not getting rid of it, they just wanna gin up support.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're doing that thing like Mr. Peanut fucking did.
BEN KISSEL
Exactly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Where he tried to kill him-fucking-self and he brought that baby peanut.
BEN KISSEL
Exactly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Now he's just showing up like we didn't all have a funeral for you?
BEN KISSEL
Exactly.
MARCUS PARKS
Now remember this was life on the frontier in the early stages of American settlement back when America and especially New England was still a deeply mysterious and lethally dangerous place where life sucked and everything was hard. However life was made even harder than it had to be by the people who were in charge of Massachusetts Colony, the ones who had founded it in the first place and were so desperately trying to hold onto their power by the late 1600s. Those people were the puritans.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Get your buckles. Hope you like your buckles.
MARCUS PARKS
Myth! Myth, myth.
BEN KISSEL
Another myth.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I've seen some buckles, I watched Witchfinder General.
BEN KISSEL
They didn't have buckles?
MARCUS PARKS
Buckles were overblown, as was the black clothing. But we'll get into it. Black was actually a very expensive color of clothing to have back in the 1600s.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cool. But again, it's Boston.
BEN KISSEL
I wish I was overblown.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're a funny guy.
MARCUS PARKS
Clever.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The puritans actually is what they called them in derogatory terms. They called themselves good Christians.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes. They also call themselves congregationalists.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
The puritans had only landed on Plymouth Rock about 70 or so years before the Salem Witch Trials. But by then 1690s, when everything went down, things were not going well for reasons both within and without their control. When it came to things the puritans could do nothing about, all of this happened during the worst part of our last big bout with climate change, the so-called Little Ice Age that lasted from the year 1400 until the year 1800.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's not very little.
BEN KISSEL
It's huge! It's 400 years.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It does sound like the muppet babies if the muppet babies cost millions of lives due to drought and pestilence.
BEN KISSEL
Little Ice Age is kind of fun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is cute.
MARCUS PARKS
Well specifically Salem occurred during the Maunder Minimum when every winter was the coldest in history and every summer was dry as a bone. Interestingly scholars have noted that there was a high correlation between eras of extreme weather like the Maunder Minimum during the Little Ice Age and outbreaks of witchcraft in Europe. Again, life sucks and everything is hard.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
When everything is difficult and society is already pinned against you, every once in a while the pressure builds and builds and builds. And one day the powderkeg pops.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely. Maunder Minimum, also a new movie starring Keanu Reeves where he goes to buffets, specifically chinese buffets and only has a little bit of food.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow, he's been thinking about that. He's so pleased.
BEN KISSEL
Isn't that something?
MARCUS PARKS
Sure is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It really is.
BEN KISSEL
And he just has a little bit of food.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, I know. Yes, you said it.
BEN KISSEL
What a surprise.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I thought you were gonna elucidate a bit but that's fine.
BEN KISSEL
What a surprise.
MARCUS PARKS
Now at the same time that everyone was either freezing to death or starving because there was no rain to grow crops, they were dealing with yet another disastrous frontier war with the indigenous tribes of New England. This caused rapid inflation which in turn caused a massive depression, causing life to suck more and making everything even harder.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Even harder and worse than it was the day before.
BEN KISSEL
Coulda done without that.
MARCUS PARKS
But for the puritans what stung the most was the fact that all these awful circumstances were not translating to increased church membership.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh then they were just like I thought that when everything sucked in life was hard, you want to come here where we tell you to feel guilty about it.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, why would this increased church membership? Why would I want to believe in god right now? He's obviously not thrilled with us killing a bunch of indigenous people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because they thought that they don't get the message that god is telling us he's mad right now.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Why aren't you all here trying to suck god's dick so that he can smile?
BEN KISSEL
Sounds like an abusive relationship to me.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is!
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well in fact the so-called city upon a hill that the puritans had envisioned, the thing that fucking Reagan stole in the 80s-
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, that was a puritan thing, the whole city upon a hill.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah it's called the dog whistle to the evangelicals. They've been doing it a long fucking time, got a lot of long plans.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I miss the old days of the dog whistle, now it's just a straight up human yell.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(screams)
MARCUS PARKS
Well this so-called city upon a hill that the puritans had envisioned when they came to America was quickly dissolving.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Okay, you ready guys?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Let's get into 5th grade history.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Get your notebooks out! All right, quit touching Tammy!
BEN KISSEL
I got a trapper keeper.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm gonna throw everyone in this classroom out on the street!
BEN KISSEL
I actually kick as trapper keeper with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on it.
MARCUS PARKS
Mine was Legend of Zelda.
BEN KISSEL
No kidding?
MARCUS PARKS
It was great, it was rare. It was rare but I got it.
BEN KISSEL
Nice!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whoa, cool.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow. My parents didn't believe in it.
BEN KISSEL
They didn't believe in trapper keepers?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, they thought it was stupid. So I had the composition books.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh wow. Weird.
BEN KISSEL
Classy boy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. I don't know why they were against it. They were like, 'We're not spending money on this.'
BEN KISSEL
It's a trapper keeper.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, they hated it.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the puritans had fled England in 1620 because they felt the Church of England was being corrupted by outside forces like the Roman Catholic Church.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Which is so funny because the Church of England was made so that Henry VIII could divorce his wife and then they are all saying it wasn't pure enough. Like yeah, yes.
BEN KISSEL
All right.
MARCUS PARKS
So the puritans fled to a place where they could practice pure Christianity, ie puritanism, although as Henry said that was not what they called themselves. Like how the Mormons called themselves Latter Day Saints and we called them Mormons, the puritans called themselves, as I said, congregationalists.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I did the tiniest bit of reading because it's very boring about protetanism, protetitit, prostetantisnism.
BEN KISSEL
Protetisism.
MARCUS PARKS
Prot, protestant.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Protesisenisms.
MARCUS PARKS
Ism?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But the idea that they got mad because the Catholic Church has a pope, right. So the idea that there's a dude that says he's the liaison between us and god and the Protestants, they said that we actually are the ones who have access to god because we believe in it. But the puritans, that wasn't even enough for them.
MARCUS PARKS
No.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They needed to go even what we now call fundamentalism, which is even more of a stripped down version of what they believed, which is just they needed their own little society because again they just hated seeing a woman's butt outline.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my goodness.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah I mean like the early mormons, puritans seemed to sort of piss off and put out pretty much everyone they came into contact with. So they founded their equivalent of Utah far away from everyone else in Massachusetts Bay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
One of the worst places in the world. I know people like it, I know people like it.
BEN KISSEL
I'm sure there's aspects of it that are great. Utah is beautiful.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The rest of the fucking pilgrims, they went to the Dominican Republic!
BEN KISSEL
Ooh the DR.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's beautiful! They went down to the islands.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's beautiful. They went to Florida, they went to all these nice temperatures. The opposite of fucking England. Can you imagine just going to worse England?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, I totally feel you. Also Dominican Republic, apparently it's a hidden gem and I was with a cab driver once and he said don't tell anybody the DR is the best place to vacation.
MARCUS PARKS
That's what I hear.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Why are you doing this then?
BEN KISSEL
I don't know! It's the ergot.
MARCUS PARKS
Is it the erg-ert pern-sern-ing?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It must be the erg-ert pern-sern-ing.
MARCUS PARKS
Well as an interesting side note, most puritans came from East Anglia in England which was the same place where the last great witch trials of England took place in which 100 people were murdered, including 15 in one day. And that was just a few short decades before Salem.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And they did it, they looked at it like they were the executives of Marvel and they're like, 'We love this, we're gonna do a full expanded universe of this. We can't wait.'
BEN KISSEL
Expanded multiverse, yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But when we think of the puritans, while they were indeed the rigid stick-up-their-ass dicks that we imagine them as, they were not quite the plain black-clothed fuddy-duddies we imagine. Rather they drank in moderation, they had taverns in Salem.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
They wore bright and fancy clothes with fancy lace if they were rich, which many of them were.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
They owned gaudy furniture, you could find a Turkish rug, a brightly colored Turkish rug in a puritan household, and they even supposedly enjoyed a good joke, a good jab.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
What kind of joke?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What do you call a woman showing her knee?
BEN KISSEL
What do you call it?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
A dead prostitute.
BEN KISSEL
Whoa! That's not funny.
MARCUS PARKS
Puritans also believed that prosperity was a sign of favor from god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Very similar to mormons as well.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. So the richer the man, the more god loved him. This is but one of many, many parallels between the puritans and modern evangelical Christians.
BEN KISSEL
I've seen Elon Musk with his shirt off, god does not love him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey man, the only thing I can ever say to defend him is that he's got a thinker's body. And the rest of us who are also built like that man just better hope that you are very charming.
MARCUS PARKS
Rob Liefeld, Captain America. That's all I see.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
MARCUS PARKS
Now because of their belief in the prosperity gospel, puritans were made up mostly of the merchant class and they left England not because they weren't doing well but because they wanted to form their own Christian theocracy where they were the ones on top. But when it comes to making life much harder than it needs to be, the puritans made it doubly so by choosing Calvinism as the backbone of their faith.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah and they had that ball and you got the tiger doll there hanging out.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah exactly. He's always pissing on Ford.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, he's always pissing on Ford. I have the one where I got him pissing on just the words 'ex- wife'.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my, Calvin.
MARCUS PARKS
I got one where he's pissing on the words 'cystic fibrosis'.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey man, fuck cystic fibrosis. I fucking hate it too. I'm with you, Calvin.
MARCUS PARKS
Basically Calvinism says that because of the fall of Adam and Eve, every person is not only born as a sinner into a life of total depravity-
BEN KISSEL
Yay!
MARCUS PARKS
But their ultimate destination of heaven or hell is already determined by god before they're even born and nothing they can do in life can change god's decision.
BEN KISSEL
Fantastic. I've been replaying Red Dead Redemption and I'm trying to be good but I just ran over a random mom on my fricking horse. And it was like now you're bad and I'm like well you know what? Fuck it then. Now everyone's dead in this town. I hate that so much though.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Because you know what? I wanna remind people you're born beautiful.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're born beautiful.
BEN KISSEL
You're born pure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, you can change your own lot in life.
BEN KISSEL
You did not do anything wrong to be born.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But the idea is that you had to live in sort of a suspense as whether or not you'll find out that a celestial Howie Mandel will arrive with a suitcase and open it up and say, 'And there's you're saved.'
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He literally just shows you god's face like, 'See it? Boom.'
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. Make a deal indeed.
MARCUS PARKS
I mean really all you could hope for was for god to show himself to you in some way to let you know that you were one of the ones going to heaven. That meant that every Calvinist spent every day wishing and hoping and praying and looking for any sign that they were going to heaven. Because if they didn't see that sign before they died, the devil would see them in hell.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'll see you in hell, Mr. Man!
BEN KISSEL
Just make it up then if you have to see god, just look at something and say that was it and move on.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes Kissel, that's what they would do.
BEN KISSEL
Good!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what I would do.
BEN KISSEL
Of course!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'd be like there's god right there!
BEN KISSEL
Boom.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Right there, see that? You see that cardinal over there? That's my Pop-Pop. He's come to see my mom.
BEN KISSEL
Who's got two thumbs and is saved?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This guy!
BEN KISSEL
You get it.
MARCUS PARKS
Now this was a highly stressful way to live especially in a time and place where it was so very easy to die. As such even while more puritans were coming from England, those who had already settled were breaking off to form new colonies and puritans were banishing even more of their brethren for heresy and differing interpretation of scripture. And because this was so stressful and because they were just banishing people left and right, there was a massive decline in church membership.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
So what's the different interpretation? Being like well technically yes, Noah did have sex with his daughter but they only did anal and you don't seem to recognize that which is bizarre that you don't recognize that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's bizarre.
BEN KISSEL
It's bizarre.
MARCUS PARKS
It could be something as small as a word. What does that word mean in the context of the larger Christianity?
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it really could be that small because remember these people were puritan, they are all about the pure word of god.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They believe the bible is infallible, every word. And unlike certain stripes that believe it is to be interpreted, right, technically most Christian sects believe that it is the word of god but it's also to be interpreted, where this is a group that believes that it is literal word for word.
BEN KISSEL
Oh yeah, absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But also because of the nature of what they believe, it can only come from the bible. So everything was lawyered, all of their faith systems were all like well I've got this provision that says I can do this and then they chunk out all the poetry and you can make it validate any single thing that you want it to.
BEN KISSEL
Most of the bible is just a list of names, it really is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is.
MARCUS PARKS
The Old Testament. But because the bible also has so many contradictions in it then that really fucks with interpretation as well because even if you take the bible as the unvarnished word of god, then you're still gonna have to interpret some of it because one thing in one book completely contradicts something in another book.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it's like reading the diaries of Andy Dick. Like oh Andy was dif on Tuesday that's for certain. And he's feeling real sorry on Thursday.
BEN KISSEL
Yes he is. Evangelicals, the King James, that's their version and they love every word.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, Lebron man.
BEN KISSEL
I do love Lebron.
MARCUS PARKS
Well in addition to the schism within puritanism, a royal decree opened the immigration of Massachusetts to all faiths, meaning Quakers and Baptists and the like were all starting to fill New England. And when I say all faiths I mean all Christian faiths.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. And there's a little bit, obviously I'm real glad we didn't get too granular on this because it does get pretty sleepy.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But there is stuff that is kind of interesting that plays into it. The idea that basically the Massachusetts colony was also getting too rich and powerful on their own separate away from England so then they have to figure out a new way to rip apart the inner governments in these places. Being like well now they're basically forming their own country 1500 miles from us.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We need to figure out a way to kind of separate all this and dissipate their little colony.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now nobody told the puritans they couldn't be puritans anymore but it was becoming obvious by the late 1600s that their status as top dog in charge of everything was soon coming to an end. And really the puritans probably would have stayed in power for far longer than they did if not for the Salem Witch Trials. As it is today with the decline and widespread freak out of Evangelical Christians, the tighter the puritans grasped, the faster everything slipped through their fingers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's almost like minority rule over a group of people that all believe they're 75% against what you believe but you're in charge and then the more you clamp down, it sort of rips society apart.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I could see that. In this movie Keanu, he just has one nugget. He doesn't even eat the Chinese food, it's just one chicken nugget.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh you mean that he eats one. I thought it was he had one testicle. ment.
BEN KISSEL
No!
MARCUS PARKS
And that's a character choice.
BEN KISSEL
No!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Interesting. But that's just in his character bio.
BEN KISSEL
He goes to an all you can eat buffet and just has a little bit.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He shows that's about control.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah exactly.
MARCUS PARKS
But outside of all the spiritual hand wringing and environmental factors, New England in the late 1600s was also a horrifically violent place owing to the many frontier wars waged against the indigenous population. By far the worst of these was King Philip's war which lasted 14 months from 1675-1676, about 15 years before Salem.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It sounds pretty rough.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was pretty violent. It's like our own version of Vietnam but it was bad because they didn't even have machine guns which kill you quick. This is arrows.
MARCUS PARKS
This is just hacking and slashing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And muskets, yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Right. So you would just tell someone who was suffering from PTSD from Vietnam that they had it too good?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You didn't really see a war. You get in a time machine, I'll show you a fucking war.
MARCUS PARKS
We've actually covered King Philip's war once before, some say that's why the Bridgewater Triangle is so haunted because that's where King Philip's war took place.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Interesting.
MARCUS PARKS
Now this war was a last ditch effort by the Wampanoag and Narragansett peoples to stop English settlement, specifically the colonies targeted were founded by puritans who all believed that the natives of New England were heathens in league with Satan.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Satan! Satan! Satan!
BEN KISSEL
Whoa!
MARCUS PARKS
Now King Philip's war was the bloodiest per capita in United States history in terms of just sheer numbers killed.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
Half of the entire indigenous population of New England died from either war, disease, starvation, and hundreds upon hundreds of colonists died and there weren't that many to begin with.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So it sets a dark tone.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS
And it also holds the distinction of being perhaps the goriest, most nightmarish war ever fought in America. Yeah, the Civil War, it was fucking bad, it was horrible.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
But King Philip's war is a fucking horror movie.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
People were just like... I was reading accounts of young women being like, 'I saw my brother falling on the field and there were the men with their hacksaws and their axes playing with his entrails.' And you're like cool! My first reaction is like awesome! And then you're like trauma.
BEN KISSEL
Well I wonder, you probably learn a lot about the human body that way, don't you?
MARCUS PARKS
You do.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You do.
MARCUS PARKS
I don't think they were interested though. The Wampanoag, they were interested in psychological warfare.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Oh okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. They regularly mutilated the bodies of slain soldiers and colonists, hanging body parts from trees and sticking heads atop poles in addition to sometimes wearing the body parts of the men they killed into their next battles.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See how I got that one dude's head on my head?
BEN KISSEL
It's kind of cool.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's kind of cool, right? It's just a hat on a hat.
BEN KISSEL
I mean if I was going into war I'd be like whoa dude, a bunch of Leatherfaces is out there man.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I think let's just not. Let's not go to war today.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But they were very much so outnumbered and so they had to do what they had to do to try to figure out how do we not get steamrolled here.
BEN KISSEL
You gotta go full Jeffrey Dahmer in prison, you gotta lean in and scare the hell out of people.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well in response, the puritans came back disproportionately harder. They burned hundreds of old people, women, and children alive by setting the fort where they were hiding on fire. The Narragansetts then took nine colonists to a place now called Nine Men's Misery where those nine men were tortured then clubbed to death.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's a good ladies only bar name.
BEN KISSEL
Nine Men's Misery?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Just a bunch of dancers, Chippendales crying on stage.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cry more! Cry more!
MARCUS PARKS
Well amongst those tortures was something called the gauntlet wherein men were made to run naked through a row of natives while being whipped to tatters, after which flesh would be cut from their legs and fire would be inserted into the wounds.
BEN KISSEL
Whoa!
MARCUS PARKS
Near the end the English soldiers were cutting the toes and fingers from Narragansetts, breaking their legs and beating the brains out of their skulls, and they did that in response to the further mutilation of bodies and the hanging of even more body parts of the English. And at this point the narragansetts were hanging severed heads from trees by hooks like it was a fucking wax museum.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Whoa!
BEN KISSEL
Whoa!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Honestly by a point you're sitting there like how do we top this?
BEN KISSEL
Exactly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What else do we do? I got an idea. We take a tree, these Christmas trees these guys like, right.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We take some guts, we wrap it around the tree, perverse evil. I'm just spitballing here.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We make Christmas evil for them, they're scared of Christmas.
BEN KISSEL
Might be the first ornament.
MARCUS PARKS
Could be. Ooh like Pumpkinhead.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah!
MARCUS PARKS
Finally though King Philip's war ended when the leader of the tribes, the titular King Philip, was hung, drawn, and quartered and beheaded. For the next 20 years Philip's head sat on a spike at Plymouth colony where it was seen by puritans every single day. Again it's a dark fucking place.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey Philip, you got any gum? Remember?
BEN KISSEL
Real good stuff there.
MARCUS PARKS
You got any gum?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hey you got any gum?
BEN KISSEL
Fantastic. So he was literally a landmark, take a right by King Philip's head, the house will be on the left.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's for them to all know, it's for them to all understand.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because wasn't that during the English Civil War?
MARCUS PARKS
Somewhat. It was more about the Narragansetts than it was about the puritans, it wasn't about this is what we'll do to you if you fuck up, this is about this is what we'll do to you if you attack us again, leave us the fuck alone.
BEN KISSEL
20 years though. Is it just a skull at the end or there's still some meat on that bone?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, it's probably skull. It might be kind of naturally preserved by the atmosphere.
MARCUS PARKS
At that time no because Massachusetts gets real humid that flesh is going to slide right off.
BEN KISSEL
That's just a skull.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it's just a skull at that point.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's cool though.
BEN KISSEL
Kinda.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now to the puritans these bloody, costly, and destructive wars were proof that the Christian man in America was in spiritual decline. And along with the bad weather it all signaled that god's wrath was coming home to roost along with the devil's mischief.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, he's coming with his short shorts! Uh oh!
BEN KISSEL
Uh oh!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Chocolate-covered pretzels! Two naughty treats wrapped into one! The devilish delight.
BEN KISSEL
I love it when they're salted pretzels, salted chocolate. So technically by this logic god only reigns in Florida.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
Because it's just beautiful weather. But I've been there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's the opposite of god's country.
MARCUS PARKS
Hurricanes.
BEN KISSEL
Oh that's very true.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, god's gonna get ya. No matter where you go, god's gonna get ya.
BEN KISSEL
Yay!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yay!
MARCUS PARKS
Well the last straw it seemed was the establishment of the Dominion of England which brought New England back under British rule and threatened the puritan dominance in the New World.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They were like fuck you, dude. They were just like all right, fuck it. Because they started making their own country.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I was trying to play Crusader Kings III.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it's a difficult game, it's very complicated.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But these guys all start there, you start at the place, right, and all these guys have the nerve to try to take over their own place now that they're there doing all the work, cultivating all the fields, building all the cities, digging all the roads. Blah, blah, blah. These are my cities, my roads.
BEN KISSEL
That's right. Every single war vet again who's out there asking for change because they have PTSD, I'm like I played Call of Duty and I'm not out there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Think about me.
BEN KISSEL
Think about me. I'm fine. Why aren't you fine?
MARCUS PARKS
Well the dominion was only the latest in a long string of governmental changes because since its founding Massachusetts had switched between being an independent and a royal colony several times in just a few decades. And each time it flipped, tax laws, property laws, and religious laws changed, ie life sucks and everything is hard.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Things were in total chaos.
BEN KISSEL
And things were unpredictable.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
But the one law that stayed the same throughout, no matter if the colony was English or independent, was thus:
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
"If any man or woman be a witch that has hath or consulted with a familiar spirit, they shall be put to death."
BEN KISSEL
That's the only law that stuck?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's the only constant.
BEN KISSEL
The most abstract, bizarre law that's ever been written down?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
I'm sure there were a couple of others but that's the stand out.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Now what's interesting about this colonial history is that one of the largest groups of accusers in Salem originally either hailed from Maine or had close family who had lived in Maine. This was important because in 1689, about two or three years before Salem, three years before Salem actually, King Philip's War had a bit of a redo-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I call it a remix.
BEN KISSEL
Yes, is it a prequel?
MARCUS PARKS
When the Abenaki tribe laid waste to most of Maine's puritan settlements, capturing or killing 300 colonists and reducing pretty much every settlement to ash.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
War, what is it good for?
MARCUS PARKS
That's right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The economy.
BEN KISSEL
Oh yes, that's right.
MARCUS PARKS
Those who escaped ended up in Massachusetts with many settling in or around Salem, seemingly chased out of their land by what they were told were minions of the devil. And also very fucking crazy PTSD on top of that. You got this insane PTSD seeing people murdered and all kinds, just brutally fucking murdered, your home is burnt to the ground, and also the devil is real.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The devil is real, every single spirit is real, every single place you go into the woods. At night there's no lights, pure black of night every time you go outside of your house.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And the winters are horrible, the summers are even worse. There's a lot going on.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
There is a lot of misery it sounds like.
MARCUS PARKS
Now the insane trauma of King Philip's war was still very much in living memory, it was only 15 years before.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
And when you combine that with the current trauma of another frontier war, you had a lot of people with PTSD who believed that these wars were happening because god was pissed they didn't go to church enough.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Do you remember the Black Plague, they tried to do that too, they said that.
BEN KISSEL
That's a great idea.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It keeps coming up.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it does.
BEN KISSEL
You want to get everyone together, screaming in a tight room.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, it's basically just saying I know, I know, the ocean has taken Florida back but you got to stay on the Patreon. Listen I know things are chaos but we got stickers coming out.
BEN KISSEL
Yep, absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS
Furthermore the native population had formed alliances with the much hated French.
BEN KISSEL
The French!
MARCUS PARKS
The French, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Were they always hated?
MARCUS PARKS
The English always hated them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well it's because they had the War of the Roses.
MARCUS PARKS
Many, many, many wars. So many wars between England and France. So many.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Why don't they just fucking not?
MARCUS PARKS
They're just right there. Because the English are right there, the French are right there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Why don't they chill? Just fucking be chill as hell.
MARCUS PARKS
I don't know man, I think it's genetic because the French still look at me and they just instinctively hate me, I don't know what it is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think it was because you were going through a glam phase when you met most of the French people you knew.
MARCUS PARKS
But what does that have to do with it?
BEN KISSEL
Yeah the French don't mind glam.
MARCUS PARKS
The French would love glam.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You were too sexual for them. They thought that you were too sexual to be an American.
BEN KISSEL
No, the French are all about love.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They were jealous.
MARCUS PARKS
And then when I talk to them and a Texas accent comes out it really confuses them and therefore they get angry.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, absolutely. And they got their striped shirts on, they hit you with a fucking baguette.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know what happens with French culture. We're about to go.
MARCUS PARKS
We are.
BEN KISSEL
I can't wait. French bread's so good.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There it's just bread.
BEN KISSEL
No, I know.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We call it French bread because we sell it to fucking huge morons.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, is Canadian bacon in Canada bacon? Fucking troll.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's a specific cut of bacon, it's peameal bacon.
BEN KISSEL
Peameal?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's what it's called.
BEN KISSEL
It's called Canadian please.
MARCUS PARKS
Well additionally the only remaining minister in maine with unquestioned puritan credentials was killed in a Wabanaki raid, signaling more than anything else that the devil was winning the war.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Man, just lean in bro.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just fucking get bikinis, they could've gotten bikinis in 1700s.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Sounds like it was freezing cold.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know.
MARCUS PARKS
No because Massachusetts you get to Kennebunkport.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Boston accent) You go down there, you go on down to Old Harbor.
MARCUS PARKS
No that's in Maine. That's in Maine.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I just know you don't go down that road.
MARCUS PARKS
Don't go down that road.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(Boston accent) Lobsters.
BEN KISSEL
Wow guys, it took 500 episodes for you guys finally to do racist accents.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We did not research Maine.
BEN KISSEL
Don't go down that road, now.
MARCUS PARKS
That's Maine. But what was the nice on in New England? Was it Port? Port something?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Fuck, they got Cape Cod.
BEN KISSEL
Jesus.
MARCUS PARKS
Cape Cod.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But I think that's New Hampshire. I don't fucking know. We are not New Englanders, you know what I mean?
BEN KISSEL
All I know is I'm just constantly replaying John Cena's theme song in my head throughout this entire series.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What is it?
BEN KISSEL
Dun-dun-dun-dun!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's brutal.
BEN KISSEL
Dun-dun-dun-dun!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Worse.
BEN KISSEL
It's John Cena.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's just three tuneless notes.
MARCUS PARKS
What does he say? What's his catchphrase? You didn't do that!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm not that guy!
BEN KISSEL
No, you can't see me.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Can't see me!
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah. Peekaboo! Is that it?
BEN KISSEL
Dun-dun-dun-dun! Peekaboo!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Everyone's just fucking pulling their car into oncoming traffic, they're writing they reviews, The Tribune-
BEN KISSEL
He's the greatest wrestler to come from Massachusetts.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is the one moment he's heard of the show.
BEN KISSEL
Newspapers are dead.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Good. Good.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, thank god.
MARCUS PARKS
Well perhaps not coincidentally though, the killing of the last puritan minister in Maine occurred in january of 1692, just when the first afflicted in Salem began showing the more intense symptoms of bewitchment. Now prior to the witch hysteria, puritan ministers tried strengthening their grip on the colony by enforcing laws against blasphemy, cursing, profane swearing, lying, unlawful gaming, sabbath breaking, idleness, drunkenness, and uncleanliness.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That is Kissel's entire life.
BEN KISSEL
I think I was like Marty McFly slowly being erased from that picture. I could just see my entire essence disappearing.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But no, they thought the best way to do this again is clamp, let's clamp down on it.
MARCUS PARKS
Well you also got to remember with puritans it wasn't necessarily cynical.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
These are people who believe that the devil is real.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They were truly afraid.
MARCUS PARKS
They're trying to stem the tide of the devil.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Real question, what could they do? You literally just listed what humans do.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
What could they do?
MARCUS PARKS
They could pray, they could go to the tavern and have a beer, one beer.
BEN KISSEL
So they could have a beer.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They could up their exports. I was reading this one thing-
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, they had commerce.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, not to put the money into it but I was reading in this history of the Christians being labelled as cannibals and demons, the first guys that kind of got got were the guys that.... It was a series of guys that were weavers that revolutionized - this is fascinating.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, weavers. Anytime you say the word 'weavers' I'm in, bro.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Settlers of Catan. I don't want to be here, you did this to me, Marcus. I used to be cool.
BEN KISSEL
(child voice) Tell me more about weavers please.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Fuck!
MARCUS PARKS
No, don't blame Settlers of Catan on me. That's Holden.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well I don't play Settlers of Catan because you can't kill.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it's true. Well the puritans were able to enforce these laws basically legislating morality because they'd just overthrown English governor Sir Edmund Andros who had received the displeasure of the puritans partly for his failed campaign against the Wabanaki in Maine. Now after Andros was gone, the Crown instituted a sort of middle ground between sole puritan sovereignty and sole English rule. Because during Andros' reign he had welcomed in Quakers, he had welcomed in Baptists, he had actually founded the first church of England in Boston. So it's not just the puritans anymore.
BEN KISSEL
Sounds like this guy's a real libturd.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was trying to do the thing which works which is let's bring in a varied group of people-
BEN KISSEL
A collection, yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
To help the society, a bunch of different people doing different jobs from different backgrounds, let's open it up.
BEN KISSEL
Big tent.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. It's not that big of a tent, it's still just white Christians.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
BEN KISSEL
Big-ish. Bigger tent.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Bigger tent than it was.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Now basically the middle ground between sole puritan sovereignty and sole English rule, basically this meant that puritans had to live under English law but they could enforce those laws through puritan rule. Which is sort of how we have freedom of religion in America but our judicial and legislative branches are currently governed from either the perspective or the strong influence of evangelical Christianity.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I certainly hope that everything doesn't fall apart because of it.
BEN KISSEL
I mean we have active people in power wanting to bring theocracy to America. So it happens, it's a constant struggle, is it not?
MARCUS PARKS
I would say bring theocracy back to America because the puritans were very much a theocracy. Before Andros brought in all of this, it was by law that you had to be a puritan to live in Massachusetts, you had to attend church service. You had to be a puritan, you couldn't vote if you weren't a puritan, you couldn't own land if you weren't a puritan. There was all kinds of shit.
BEN KISSEL
That's Massachusetts. I'm talking federal government.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sounds like you're suffering from erg-ert per-sern-ing.
MARCUS PARKS
Well okay, put it this way. You could be a Quaker in Massachusetts by law in 1692, that was allowed. But your beliefs were not represented in the puritan government and you may in fact even be despised by that government, even though the puritans in charge were quickly fading away into the minority.
BEN KISSEL
Do you get aroused if you see a pig wag his tail so you can see his butthole? You might be a Quaker.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
See, puritans love a good joke.
BEN KISSEL
I love it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's a puritan joke.
MARCUS PARKS
That's a puritan joke.
BEN KISSEL
Great joke.
MARCUS PARKS
But concerning the government in Massachusetts when the witch accusations kicked off, there really wasn't one to speak of outside of the local municipalities who handled their own problems and enforced their own rules. This was because the government in 1692, at least early 1692, it was still in transition to the middle ground charter. In other words nobody is in charge, people are scared, the devil is real, life sucks and everything is hard.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It keeps building.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It really does. And the fact that there was no charter, they literally had just gotten rid of all of the laws. So they had to figure it out.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There was just kind of some main kind of hangover from the previous administration, the people that were running it. But when all of this started happening, they had yet to start a new constitution for themselves.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So they were just fucked.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
It's like halfway through the movie Animal House when their charter is revoked but they have a great time. But it seems like they didn't have a great time.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They had fun with it. Besides some of the light sexual assault that's in the film, they actually had fun in it.
BEN KISSEL
Yes. It sounds like it could have been a great time for music. It seems like everything is going horrible but the devil is real.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, dude. (flute sounds)
BEN KISSEL
Why didn't someone just pick up a violin and start shredding?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Chunky flute was all over it.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The puritans, they had singing at church.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well the violin didn't really come to America until you started having Irish immigrants coming over and European immigrants coming over.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah you fucking idiot. Fuck you.
MARCUS PARKS
And that's when you know the banjo started coming. The banjo was brought by Africans and then those two things-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You piece of shit, you don't know anything. Fucking listen to this guy. You fucking idiot, how dare you? Oh why didn't they get their violin?
MARCUS PARKS
And those are the two things that combined to form country music.
BEN KISSEL
Oh fantastic.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. I watched Ken Burns' Country Music, I know these things.
BEN KISSEL
I love that documentary.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah. From the simple bump on top of a basket to a long-legged man all in denim, country music was the rage across this great nation of ours. And over the next 429 hours I will describe each one, each tremulous note on the banjo.
MARCUS PARKS
That music documentary was 16 hours long.
BEN KISSEL
Because it was amazing! I got a chance to interview Ken Burns and my friend, yes you do sound like him a little bit because it's the details. The details.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, it's the details. But on the other hand I will say that that documentary didn't go into outlaw country enough, not enough details on outlaw country.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's because he didn't like cocaine.
BEN KISSEL
Yes, Ken probably didn't and I can't imagine that he related.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. To Waylon and Merle and all that.
BEN KISSEL
He's a sweet man.
MARCUS PARKS
Yes he is. Well all of this is to say that life for a devout Massachusetts puritan in 1692 was a highly anxious existence and Salem, rural backwater that it was, had the reputation of being even more anxious and even more combative than the rest of Massachusetts. It was a pain in the ass town full of pain in the ass people who all pretty much hated each other.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sitcom!
MARCUS PARKS
See in the 1650s and 1660s Salem became a town more associated with commerce than farming which caused a rift between town residents and farm residents.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just team up!
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They don't get it, team up.
MARCUS PARKS
Nope. Resentments grew and the founding families became alienated from the newcomers. This is just one of the first schisms that will rip Salem apart.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Schisms happened a lot during this whole time period.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
It seems like it.
MARCUS PARKS
Everyone's coming up with new shit, everyone's trying to figure out what this new era of the world is going to be, this new era of humanity.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
It's after the enlightenment, it's after all this shit. They're reading Thomas Paine, I don't know what the fuck is going on now.
BEN KISSEL
Better not make it any fun.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah definitely not.
BEN KISSEL
Don't want that.
MARCUS PARKS
Well after that the smaller Salem settlements formed into their own towns, raising their own taxes and hiring their own ministers which caused even more disputes. That however didn't solve anything internally because disputes in the Salem area occurred on even a level as micro as the local meeting house. See if you wanted to worship at fellowship in rural colonial Massachusetts you'd go to the meeting house at the center of each town. This was where villagers received communion and baptized their children.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Puritan stance, that was one of the things that they rebelled against was the rigid things and the amount of rituals that the Catholic Church did because they amounted it to idolatry. You were not supposed to taking the eucharist all the time, they felt that it was a thing you did once or twice a year, it was for those that were truly saved, they were the ones that were really kind of a part of it. They felt that the Catholics were far too brazen allowing anybody to take the eucharist.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. You gotta be Catholic though.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But they also felt that when you knelt and you believe the idea that the eucharist became the blood and the flesh of Christ which is what the Catholics believed-
BEN KISSEL
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And that if you kneel at it you're worshiping the eucharist which they also felt was idolatry. And so their thing was societally it's real tight.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But ritually it's real loose, we just kind of throw it out there. Baptism is the most important thing and then going to supper.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
You're gonna want to have, what's it called, transmutation? Something like that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I believe it's transubstantiation.
MARCUS PARKS
Transubstantiation.
BEN KISSEL
There we go.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I remember Catholic school.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the puritans, they were focused on the important shit: the seating chart.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Always.
BEN KISSEL
God no.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's never changed in New England, it hasn't changed ever since. The fights that must happen at New England weddings.
BEN KISSEL
And I can already see their great great great great great great great great granddaughters right now, the head of the HOA, driving everyone fricking insane.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh my god. I mean really a lot of the disagreements in Salem, it's HOA shit. It's these petty small grievances that fucking add up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That just explode.
BEN KISSEL
You're gonna wanna notice your fence is not quite high enough and I can see you changing.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I watch you change every day and it should be illegal to watch how slowly you put on a pair of pants.
MARCUS PARKS
Well seating in the meeting house was not first come first serve but assigned and based on social rank.
BEN KISSEL
See I'm actually not against this because I don't like the Southwest Airlines approach. I don't like to have to fight for my seat. But I also don't like the idea of it being like a hierarchy but also I like a good assigned seat.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Complicated.
MARCUS PARKS
But that's the thing is that you chose that seat when you bought that airline ticket, they did not choose that for you. The seating here is being chosen for you.
BEN KISSEL
But it's still assigned.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Very much so. It's like how you get invited to what you find out about quote unquote "Hollywood show business parties" that you find out a lot of times you're invited to certain levels.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Like oh you got that red band? Great, you can come to this small bar.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Unfortunately if you want to go to that other place, you're gonna need a turquoise band as well. And then you find out how low you are on the totem pole by where you're allowed to drink one watered down whiskey drink.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely. Which is why you should never go to those things.
MARCUS PARKS
Well the wealthy were at the front and everyone else was behind them, and the children, servants, and enslaved people were all up in the balconies. The seating custom however brought its own problems. In 1680 in Andover where many later witchcraft accusations would occur, remember it wasn't just Salem, a new meeting house was built which meant a new seating plan.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Fuck! We just got this fucking figured out!
BEN KISSEL
Oh man. You didn't fucking think about that, Larry!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Fuck!
BEN KISSEL
Hey Larry, you didn't think about that, did you?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Listen, okay. No seats. Everybody stands.
BEN KISSEL
No seats?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Fuck, where do they stand?
MARCUS PARKS
This set neighbor upon neighbor in yet another friction inducing incident.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This is so fucked up where these are the tiny things that led up to mass execution.
BEN KISSEL
It's crazy how simple it all is.
MARCUS PARKS
It's very small. It's very silly. And remember these communities are at most 500 people. Salem was about 500.
BEN KISSEL
Sounds like they're all Milton from Office Space just like, 'If I get to be in the goddamn middle again I'm gonna fucking break down.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is like that.
BEN KISSEL
If I'm in the middle seat one more fucking time...
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
These are the last little things that give them any form of status or hold in their society. Because again their crops are fucked.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They are in total absolute chaos.
MARCUS PARKS
And remember they're importing all of their food, all of their foodstuffs are being imported so you have insane inflation, you have depression, they're fighting these frontier wars, the fucking colonial government is printing more and more money off which makes it even worse.
BEN KISSEL
Great.
MARCUS PARKS
Everything is fucked.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So this is the only thing you got is like I sat in row B!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. And remember everyone here is living under a tremendous amount of stress and pressure just to survive everyday life. Every day is a gift to these people.
BEN KISSEL
Doesn't sound like a gift.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, it sounds like a fucking oy-yoy-yoy.
BEN KISSEL
That's what it sounds like.
MARCUS PARKS
Any day you don't choke on your own fucking phlegm, that is a good day.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Nice.
BEN KISSEL
I guess.
MARCUS PARKS
Additionally these people were not living anywhere even close to modern New England. If you've ever been out in those forests or even driven through New England at night, you can attest that it can be a terrifying place.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And it's said that New England felt haunted even before so many colonists and indigenous people died out there.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's why Ted Kennedy did what he did.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, left that woman to die?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He was so scared of the ghosts.
BEN KISSEL
Oh he was.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's was the thing, as soon as the girl was dying, he was sitting there and then he saw them going (ghost moans). (Boston accent) I gotta get outta here. Oh no.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah and then he could never be president, he just had to be a senator for 50 GD years.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's all.
MARCUS PARKS
And since people were already living under such a constant state of anxiety, the small frictions that naturally occur between neighbors became highly contentious, spiteful, and as serious as life and death. This was all made worse of course by the fact that the puritans of Salem couldn't hold on to a minister willing to put up with their shit to save their lives because as I said many of them, if not most of them, were pains in the ass.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Do you remember what it would be like to be a mod in a Facebook group in the early 2000s, mid 2000s?
MARCUS PARKS
Ugh!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's that.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You're just looking at a bunch of people already at everybody's throats about the dumbest shit possible while everything is falling apart.
BEN KISSEL
Right. And also it's further evidence that the minister indeed is a human position and you can just see these ministers like, 'Y'all are fucking nuts, huh? So I'm just gonna go, I'm gonna take my god and go I guess.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm gonna go. Because also what's weird too is that because they were anti the idea that they're gatekeepers to god, they were very anti that.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So it's kind of funny how these pastors in their world were still important even though they didn't they weren't god's X-Men like priests were in the Catholic Church.
MARCUS PARKS
But they're meant to be community leaders.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
These guys are there to soothe tensions, that's what they're supposed to do.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
But in Salem they were quite the hard cat to tame. In 1684-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's hard to tame a cat.
MARCUS PARKS
I know it's hard to tame a cat.
BEN KISSEL
It's exceptionally hard.
MARCUS PARKS
Feral cat, it's like a feral cat. I don't know why the fuck I said that but a feral cat is very difficult to tame.
BEN KISSEL
It is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It is a hard horse to make dance.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely. Especially if it wants to dance backwards.
MARCUS PARKS
Well in 1684, Salem hired a minister named Deodat Lawson who in his attempt to unify the village only made enemies. Factions formed both in support and in defiance of Reverend Lawson which introduced new divisions into the community that already had too many to keep track of.
BEN KISSEL
Great. How am I doing?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
How am I doing?
BEN KISSEL
How am I doing?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Listen, I'm sorry I put in benches instead of individual chairs and you all have to share the benches and you're not sure where your butt...
BEN KISSEL
Pastor! Pastor!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, yeah?
BEN KISSEL
Actually Mary gained 15 lbs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. That's rude by the way cause she's pregnant.
BEN KISSEL
No cause she's in my seat.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's rude!
BEN KISSEL
She's coming into my seat.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Mary's sitting for two now.
BEN KISSEL
Can you move her?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Mary, will you get up and allow Samantha?
BEN KISSEL
She's in my seat!
MARCUS PARKS
Lawson though, he left after his wife and child died in Salem.
BEN KISSEL
Jesus!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Life is hard and everything sucks.
BEN KISSEL
All right.
MARCUS PARKS
He had been the third minister to serve in Salem Village in 16 years. This was a time and place, a minister's average time of service in a town: 22 years.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
And they've gone through three in 16.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah so they just get all the guys that have reached the end of their career, they just get whoever wants the shitty assignment.
MARCUS PARKS
Well it's whoever is kind of new and doesn't really give a shit.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
And that's how they got minister number four, a lantern-jawed pain in the ass who fit right in named Samuel Parris.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Fuck this guy.
BEN KISSEL
I've heard this name before.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, fuck this fucking guy. I hate this guy.
MARCUS PARKS
He's the worst. Also he's a failed businessman. Pastor is like the third thing he's done in life.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Parris came in hard, immediately demanding a higher salary than the last guy, Deodat Lawson, so he could quote unquote "help the community prosper".
BEN KISSEL
Oh that only makes sense to give him more money then.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
This all is about you and is certainly not about me.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. So we're going to give you more money to help us.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The whole thing is when you give me money-
BEN KISSEL
Yeah?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Don't you want to see me smile?
BEN KISSEL
I love it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That really helps me. And then you hear him go, 'Oh you're a bunch of bitches and should all be killed by the lord.'
BEN KISSEL
And then if there's a big storm you'll help us out, right? Like we can come here and seek shelter?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Let the preacher keep himself safe first.
BEN KISSEL
Oh okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because honestly it's better for me to meet god if we die first and then I can help you get all in there.
BEN KISSEL
Awesome, here's all our money because we don't have a lot to begin with.
MARCUS PARKS
Well additionally Parris also demanded free firewood so he could quote unquote "write his sermons at night".
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh now we're going to deal with your insomnia?
MARCUS PARKS
And after 8 months of negotiating on how many ducats they'd give him, pounds by this point, how many pounds, how much free firewood, how often, he and the village finally agreed on a price. Samuel Parris began preaching in Salem in November of 1689, less than three years before the trials that made Salem infamous began. Now immediately Samuel Parris told his parishioners that he was going to crusade for moral reformation and he was gonna increase church membership. At the same time though Parris, a puritan hardliner, had refused the only thing that made increasing puritan membership feasible. That was the halfway covenant.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah dude.
BEN KISSEL
Okay, what's that?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You got a coupon for half off your soul.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
See because puritans had the well-deserved reputation as strict reactionaries, their numbers had quickly declined within a single generation in America. We went through all the reasons why. By 1662, 30 years before Salem, the puritans were so desperate to bring back members that they came up with a highly confusing compromise called the halfway covenant.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's called the family plan.
BEN KISSEL
Okay, this is great.
MARCUS PARKS
This I think said that children of non members could be baptized into the church, making their parents partial members who could participate in every aspect of puritan worship except partaking in the lord's supper, that's what they called communion.
BEN KISSEL
Okay, sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well they didn't have to come to church all the time. So basically you kind of get off the hook for some of the more stricter provisions of being a puritan but you're also allowed to get baptized which allows you to vote.
BEN KISSEL
Awesome.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And be within the culture.
BEN KISSEL
It makes all the sense in the world. Definitely an all knowing, all powerful god would come up with this.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They always come up with really minute specific jurisprudence.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's how you know it's genuinely from the lord.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely not at all a human creation, no.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No.
MARCUS PARKS
Nah. Well appropriately, of the five puritan ministers accused of witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials, five ministers, all five had accepted the halfway covenant while Samuel Parris, arguably the driving spiritual force of the trials, was a staunch opponent.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's like he helped make it all happen but then kind of got away without it fucking with him at all.
BEN KISSEL
Weird.
MARCUS PARKS
Now by Parris' second year in Salem he'd only gained seven new members.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But they're big! As you can see if you look at each one, each one is fairly large so some stand for at least three.
BEN KISSEL
Pound for pound, absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS
This was far less than he promised.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
And the parishioners he'd started with only showed up to church every once in a while because nobody really liked Samuel Parris.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He wasn't good at it.
MARCUS PARKS
No. As a result, Parris did what many religious leaders in decline do. What do you think, Ben? What do you think he did?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What do you think he did?
BEN KISSEL
I'm going to assume he said you can come in and you can have more wine.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Interesting.
BEN KISSEL
More wine?
MARCUS PARKS
More wine.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Two words.
BEN KISSEL
More wine.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Bikini carwash.
BEN KISSEL
Bikini carwash. It is so funny to me growing up religious when people go to churches and they scout pastors.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL
But then some pastors would be like, 'I just didn't like his delivery.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, they really do.
BEN KISSEL
It's the same as someone going to see stand-up and being like, 'He's no Fluffy.'
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They look at them because again, especially in this time period, he's the central figure of your whole life.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You go and you're supposed to like this guy.
MARCUS PARKS
You're gonna see him like two times a week, you gotta go and listen to him. It is like Ben said, imagine going to see a stand-up comic you don't like for an hour twice a week.
BEN KISSEL
Exactly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's called being a stand-up.
BEN KISSEL
I mean it is.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's all they do.
MARCUS PARKS
Well no, he did not do bikini carwash, he did not say more free wine, he turned up the volume on the paranoia and fear. He gave war-like sermons in which Jesus Christ was not a prince of peace but a champion of conquest and an enemy of evil.
BEN KISSEL
Also folks, you're gonna want to invest in your tactical bath. I got a tactical bath here and as you can tell, my skin is falling off of my body.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I've been in there for 7 days.
BEN KISSEL
Yes indeed.
MARCUS PARKS
Now Samuel Parris as I said, he was not popular in Salem and near the end of 1691, just a few months before the first afflicted appeared, quite a few people in Salem got tired of Parris' shit. They're about to go through number four in 18 years.
BEN KISSEL
Jeez.
MARCUS PARKS
But since they couldn't fire Parris outright for whatever reason, they elected instead to just stop paying him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, maybe he'll leave.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, maybe he'll leave.
BEN KISSEL
Great.
MARCUS PARKS
And they also cut off all his firewood just before a New England Little Ice Age winter began.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
My poor wrists, what am I supposed to do? I just will, all right, some of these trees are old. Hopefully maybe I could just (grunting) give it a push. Servants!
BEN KISSEL
I do love they just stopped paying him being like, 'He'll leave. We know how to get rid of these pastors.'
MARCUS PARKS
Now there were a few people backing Samuel Parris, mostly those who were the most devout and hardlined.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sour-faced old bitches.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, partly. So instead of soothing tensions, Parris doubled down and only made the divisions in Salem worse by demonizing those who would stand against him.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Well that's like every single time I used to go, my mom used to sing in the Christmas choir, the one time I would enter a church to support my mother right, I'd go in-
BEN KISSEL
Oh I would've loved to see that. God. How was her voice?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
My mom has a beautiful voice.
BEN KISSEL
Oh she does.
MARCUS PARKS
Runs in the family. All the Zebrowski's have a great singing voice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She's a trained singer, she went to college for music, that's what she was supposed to do.
BEN KISSEL
Fantastic.
MARCUS PARKS
And she ended up with you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep. She's thankful. But I remember going into the church and it was just again obviously that's when we're past being a satanist or whatever and every single time the priest would just ball everybody out for the only time people come is at Christmas. And I was like you fucking moron! You should be crushing it right now, you should be up there in A-game, you should be making us laugh, making us cry.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS
A-game.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because then all you do is bitch us out every single time we come to fucking church, I'm not coming back here.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah. That's a little lesson as well, speaking of stand-up comedy. If there's four people there, don't crucify them for showing up.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
No, play the crowd that you got.
BEN KISSEL
Play to the crowd that's there.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Parris raised the stakes even higher in October of 1691, just a few months before the accusations began when the perfect scapegoat appeared in nearby Chelmsford. It's probably Helmsford.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Helmsford.
MARCUS PARKS
Helmsford or something awful.
BEN KISSEL
Okay. Fantastic.
MARCUS PARKS
There a woman named Martha Sparks, which is my new female alias by the way-
BEN KISSEL
Oh I know you love it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, Martha Sparks.
BEN KISSEL
Marcus Parks and Martha Sparks, do you wed?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes. Yes! Did you see that picture that we put up for the socials? You look sexy.
MARCUS PARKS
I've seen me as a woman. It's pretty good. It's pretty good. I would have been a pretty girl.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But you was wasted on being a man.
MARCUS PARKS
Unfortunately yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Yes indeed. We've asked you to be a woman a lot.
MARCUS PARKS
You really have. Yeah. It's my choice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I wish. Yep.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Martha Sparks was charged with witchcraft and sent to prison. Now once Parris heard of this diabolical infection just 30 or so miles away, he began to carefully calculate his sermons with the purpose of scaring his opponents into ending their opposition by saying the devil was coming for Salem.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Look he's over there!
BEN KISSEL
Whoa!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm sorry, that was Brian. Why are you crouching? Oh he's shitting. We need toilets! What is happening here?
BEN KISSEL
It is a horrible time to be alive. But interesting, so it wasn't Salem that was the first witch... The first witch wasn't detected in Salem, it was 30 miles out.
MARCUS PARKS
No. Yeah, it really was. Now if Samuel Parris was a fear monger on the pulpit, one can only imagine what kind of anxiety monster he was at home.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Someone burnt the broccoli, it's the devil himself!
BEN KISSEL
Broccoli wasn't invented yet.
MARCUS PARKS
It wasn't invented?
BEN KISSEL
Broccoli was invented.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was. All right, when was broccoli... Now I gotta know.
BEN KISSEL
Broccoli is man made and came around the 60s.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
When was broccoli invented?
BEN KISSEL
1960s.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
6th century. It was around.
BEN KISSEL
It was not around.
MARCUS PARKS
You got the 6 right.
BEN KISSEL
No, it was not around!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It was first introduced to England in the mid 18th century.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, so it wasn't around.
MARCUS PARKS
It wasn't around then.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I guess it wasn't. I'm so fucking sorry my little act out wasn't historically perfect.
BEN KISSEL
Yep.
MARCUS PARKS
It was introduced to England in the 1800s, was it introduced by America?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
1700s.
BEN KISSEL
No, we didn't any any!
MARCUS PARKS
Was it introduced much like the tomato was an American fruit first?
BEN KISSEL
God almighty. Okay, let's just move on.
MARCUS PARKS
The tomato?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm gonna end this whole show.
BEN KISSEL
They didn't have anything.
MARCUS PARKS
Well it's almost certain that Samuel Parris believed his own bullshit. Therefore the Parris household was one of stress, stress about Parris' salary, stress about their dwindling supply of firewood in the face of winter, and the stress of believing that the patriarch was preparing himself to have a personal battle with the devil.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my gosh.
MARCUS PARKS
Most likely this was all Samuel Parris talked about at home. So it is certainly not a coincidence that the first to be afflicted by witchcraft in Salem was Samuel Parris' daughter and niece.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because one thing we'll talk about in this society is that again children especially were to be seen and not heard ,they were a part of the workforce.
MARCUS PARKS
They were barely people.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
They're barely people. And so I think that there is a stripe. I did start reading another book on the Salem Witch Trials that I think was called 'The Witches' that kind of talked a little bit about that and this idea that it'd kind of become a way for you to say like, 'Hello father, will you please pay attention to me? Will you say hello to me?'
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then you start to play into his fantasy a little bit.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, how you get into his hobby.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
That's what it is, witchcraft is technically dad's hobby. Beginning in the fall of 1691, the two young girls began subtly twitching almost constantly.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Are you sure they just weren't on TikTok?
BEN KISSEL
Get outta here.
MARCUS PARKS
And that soon evolved into the violent jerking of body parts and frequent verbal outbursts. Eventually they got worse when one girl woke to find her jaw jutting forward uncontrollably, all while her face contracted in spasms. The children soon began saying that they were being bitten by invisible specters and their arms, necks, and backs twisted and contorted in ways that were seemingly impossible, all while they convulsed uncontrollably.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's because he's never seen dancing. He's never seen anybody do vigorous things besides with a scythe.
MARCUS PARKS
Well this is something that Natalie actually taught me on the ride back from San Diego is that it's not the contortionism is impossible, it's just that your brain is telling you don't do that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah because you're gonna hurt yourself.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So the contortion training is you're basically training your nervous system to be chill with you challenging it.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. But these girls in the throes of whatever was happening to them, they were able to bypass that neurological function. Now they were sometimes unable to talk, their throats sometimes became choked, and they reported that pins were being stuck into their flesh, all while specters only they could see pinched them repeatedly. And pinching by the way, that could be anything from a little St. Patrick's Day tweak to agonizing torture.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Don't touch me on St. Patrick's fucking Day. Don't fucking touch me ever.
BEN KISSEL
What is this? I've never heard of that.
MARCUS PARKS
You've never heard of getting pinched if you don't wear green?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
If you don't wear green.
BEN KISSEL
On St. Patrick's Day?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I guess i always wear green.
MARCUS PARKS
How have you never heard of that? That is the only thing about St. Patrick's Day that you know when your child.
BEN KISSEL
I've never heard of that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The thing is I feel like the pin thing-
MARCUS PARKS
That's crazy. That's insane that you've never heard of that.
BEN KISSEL
No!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The pinching was a thing that certain areas of the world, I think it's more talked about in terms of being appropriate to fucking pinch somebody. It's like birthday spanks. Remember those?
BEN KISSEL
Oh yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
How many men convinced me I was supposed to get those.
MARCUS PARKS
When I was a kid you didn't get pinched in the nipple or anything or your bottom.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I did get, what did they call it?
BEN KISSEL
Purple nurple?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Purple nurple, yeah. That's cause I have big old voluptuous titties and people can't keep their hands off it. Especially other little boys because they don't fucking understand body autonomy.
BEN KISSEL
It's a right of passage.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now upon seeing all this, Samuel Parris could only come to the conclusion of witchcraft. So he brought a doctor to inspect the girls, a one Dr. Griggs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Name's Dr. Griggs!
BEN KISSEL
Sweet.
MARCUS PARKS
He too decided that the girls had come under an evil hand.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Come on, let's take a look at this! Well you're acting a little bit too rock and roll to be normal!
MARCUS PARKS
These days most specialists agree that these girls and many of the afflicted who came after may have been suffering from a condition called conversion disorder.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What?
MARCUS PARKS
It's basically physicalized fear and anxiety.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's kind of what we talked about how like the concept of letting yourself go crazy finally.
MARCUS PARKS
It's not like that, no, no, it's not about letting go.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I know. But I feel like as the accusations increase, there's something about this idea of giving yourself into the freedom of like, 'Ah! I'm crazy!'
BEN KISSEL
Cutting loose.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And just ready to go.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely. And of course in the evangelical belief there's a lot of absolute freaking out going on.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah. Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS
Well conversion disorder suggests that a person's anxiety, stress, and trauma can be converted into a very real and uncontrollable physical affliction like the ones exhibited by Samuel Parris' daughter and niece.
BEN KISSEL
Sure.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
High stress.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, high stress. And I'm sure conversion disorder has probably been discounted or whatever, we'll probably get a bunch of emails or something. But it is a theory, it's a Freudian thing.
BEN KISSEL
Dude no, if you're super stressed out, yeah, it's just like (screaming).
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, a lot of fucked up things that you can exhibit like rashes and tics. It's still now.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well germane to the Salem Witch Trials is the possibility that in rare cases conversion disorder can spread to other susceptible people like a virus. It's like a sort of anxiety as contagion.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Next episode I plan to go in a little bit more about mass hysteria and what its origins are.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well additionally hyperventilation caused by fear can produce some of the other effects that were back then scientifically known as bewitchment. Hyperventilation can produce a cramped throat, suffocation, fainting, and in extreme cases seizures.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
In our voice class in college they made us hyperventilate.
MARCUS PARKS
Wow.
BEN KISSEL
How'd it go?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Stupid.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
How does it help acting? I don't know. It was all about being vulnerable. And they always used to tell us breathe with our buttholes.
BEN KISSEL
Is that right?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wink it. Yep. Look at me now, you see how I wow (wheezing).
BEN KISSEL
Wow, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah, I'm way open.
MARCUS PARKS
It gets stuck. I can feel it pushing up against my butthole.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
(groaning)
BEN KISSEL
Okay. All right well let's just use our mouth and our nose. It seems like that's better.
MARCUS PARKS
Well once the fear that causes these symptoms causes real pain, it confirms the sufferers original fears which in turn intensifies the pain, catching the suffer in an ever quickening vicious cycle. Now from the Parris girls the witchcraft hysteria slowly began to spread. On January 12, 1692 a woman named Alice Parker was lying in the dirt and snow in Salem Town, seemingly dead. Good wife Parker had a history of quote unquote "fits of unconsciousness".
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, sometimes I go to sleep. That's it, must go to sleep. They don't know what happened to me. I fell out of a cart. But ever since then sometimes I just go to sleep. That's me.
BEN KISSEL
You gotta take a nap sometimes.
MARCUS PARKS
You know what I found was fun about these times is that a lot of people died from falling out of carts.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I bet.
BEN KISSEL
What?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, I think if you fell out of the front then the wheels crushed you.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, you'd get trampled by the horses.
BEN KISSEL
You wanna sit in there, sit down.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, sit down.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's not comfortable.
BEN KISSEL
Grab something.
MARCUS PARKS
Well back then, we know this woman was suffering from epilepsy and back then epilepsy was seen as a sign of the devil. And the men who were called to help this poor woman were scared to touch her because they might get some of the devil on them.
BEN KISSEL
You're not gonna get the devil on you.
MARCUS PARKS
Finally though the men mustered up enough courage to carry her home and put her in bed. But as they tucked her in, she very suddenly sat up and began laughing uncontrollably. She's a deadite.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, she's a deadite. Yeah. They're like (screaming).
BEN KISSEL
So cool.
MARCUS PARKS
And the villagers, they weren't far off from that conclusion. But while this wasn't specifically attached to witchcraft just yet, it certainly increased tensions in town.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Remember man, this is still like... Have you ever been to the area? It's scary as fuck.
MARCUS PARKS
So fucking creepy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's creepy. And so this type of shit on some level it's funny to me imagining her springing up but also just the idea of a woman stiff as a board, that you could be dead, and then you're all deeply afraid of her because anything out of the normal is the work of the devil.
BEN KISSEL
It could be Evil Dead.
MARCUS PARKS
Now by February of 1692, Samuel Parris was firmly convinced that his daughter and niece were bewitched.
BEN KISSEL
I am firmly convinced.
MARCUS PARKS
But because god waits for no man, Samuel and his wife traveled to a neighboring village one day to attend a religious sermon in another town.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Okay, you're twisting and shoving and yelling and cursing. Okay well I have a gig I have to get to. Yes, so all of this, let's put a pin in that. And I will be back, okay? You keep seizuring until I get back cause I still wanna make sure that the devil's inside of you when I'm back cause that gives me something to do.
BEN KISSEL
Fascinating.
MARCUS PARKS
While they were gone, the two afflicted girls spoke with a neighbor named Mary Sibley and Mary Sibley told them that if they really wanted to figure out if they were being plagued by a witch, they needed to practice a little magic of their own. They needed to bake a witch cake.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Now they all became witches.
BEN KISSEL
What's a witch cake?
MARCUS PARKS
You'll love this. A witch cake was a loaf of rye bread mixed with the urine of the afflicted and baked into hot ashes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, you gotta get the girls to piss in the bread.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Or you get them to piss in a bowl and you pour it into the bread.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah man.
BEN KISSEL
I mean I've seen the documents.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
However you wanna do it.
BEN KISSEL
But it's not cake though.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
There's more than one way to get the piss out of a girl.
BEN KISSEL
I guess they had a different meaning of cake.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Well the cake was then fed to the family dog.
BEN KISSEL
What?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep. Dog.
BEN KISSEL
Don't do that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I actually don't know what the dog does to then find the witch.
MARCUS PARKS
Well what the dog does is when the dog eats the loaf it's supposed to hurt the witch because you're being eaten, because the witch might then reveal itself because it's getting eaten.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
She's going (screaming).
BEN KISSEL
It's gonna hurt the dog.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Help! Help!
MARCUS PARKS
Well basically if the witch sent evil to torture these girls then part of that witch would be in the evil that afflicted them which was inside their bodies. But if you removed a part of their bodies, in this case urine, you could bake it into a cake and feed it to the dog to torment the tormentor and thereby identify them.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It doesn't have to make sense.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Only just because it doesn't.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah cause it also didn't really work that way.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It doesn't do anything.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah well it didn't really even work the way it was supposed to in Salem even though it did work.
BEN KISSEL
I mean blood would be more of the body.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah but that's different.
MARCUS PARKS
Then you gotta hurt them. If you just pee-pee, you're gonna be pee-peeing multiple times a day.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, everybody pee-pees like 15, 20 times a day. I don't have diabetes.
BEN KISSEL
Of course.
MARCUS PARKS
Now up til this point witchcraft was a very abstract thing to these first two affected girls. But in the baking of the witch cake magic became very real and physicalized which only made things worse.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Because now we're all in this game together.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
You just know for a fact there was some chubby boy who went to eat the cake and then they're looking at him like buddy, you don't want to eat that cake.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
What's wrong?
BEN KISSEL
I love this cake.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's actually really nice.
BEN KISSEL
This is really good cake, it's nice.
MARCUS PARKS
Once the Parris family dog ate the cake, the two afflicted girls cried out that their tormentor was within their own household.
BEN KISSEL
Whoa!
MARCUS PARKS
According to them the person behind the torture was one of the two people enslaved by Samuel Parris. Forgot to mention he's also a slave owner.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yes.
BEN KISSEL
Oh you forgot to mention that. Nice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, yes. But that's totally legal so it's cool.
BEN KISSEL
Oh okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Her name was Tituba and she had been singled out as the witch most likely because she had been the one to bake the witch cake, making her the closest thing to a witch at hand.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Even though you asked her to do it.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah, that's ridiculous.
MARCUS PARKS
Told her to do it.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And Tituba obviously is the one you'd call what we said at the very top, the quote unquote "usual suspects" because she is the help. And so immediately they're the first people suspected of witchcraft.
BEN KISSEL
It ain't right.
MARCUS PARKS
Now while we don't know much about Tituba's origins, she was most likely born in either the Caribbean or Florida and was brought to New England by Samuel Parris from Barbados. However Tituba was not of African origin despite how she's often portrayed in movies and films and stage. Rather Tituba was-
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I think Ti-chu-ba.
MARCUS PARKS
Ti-chu-ba.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cause Tit-u-ba sounds like...
MARCUS PARKS
Ti-chu-ba. Now I'm remembering why I'm saying Tit-u-ba is because that's how me and my buddy Wes used to say it in high school when we studied The Crucible.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes.
MARCUS PARKS
And we would just drive around in my truck and just scream Tit-u-ba at each other.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Say the word over and over again.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh Tituba! We used to have a lot of fun with that.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah cause it's fun, it's a childish way to have fun. You just say the word 'tit' in there.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, I guess that's why it's funny cause it also sounds like a tit tuba which is a tuba made out of tits.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah. Oh no, I'm following you friend.
BEN KISSEL
Right.
MARCUS PARKS
Or a gigantic tit that you blow on and it makes a tuba sound.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Actually that's what I saw.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely, there's a whole series of different ways to say it. Yup.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Ty-chu-ba.
BEN KISSEL
All right.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Tituba was one of the Kaline people of South America which were one of the many indigenous tribes who had been enslaved by Europeans since 1492. Now just the single fact that the Parris family had been the first afflicted was highly embarrassing for the reverend but Tituba's involvement as the witch herself was doubly mortifying for Salem's so-called spiritual leader.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh and my employees? Everything's falling apart!
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
I mean I hope she has her revenge!
MARCUS PARKS
She doesn't. However neighbor Mary Sibley had given Parris a gift in the form of the witch cake. Now he could blame the arrival of Satan on magic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes!
MARCUS PARKS
Instead of the actions of his daughter and niece.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yes, yes!
MARCUS PARKS
Making Parris completely blameless in the whole affair.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Nothing but net!
MARCUS PARKS
And this was even though the witch cake was baked long after the affliction started.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Oh it's fantastic the way it all worked out for him.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. What's interesting about the first afflicted though is the fact that both Parris' niece and his daughter disappeared from the proceedings fairly early on, they were not the main accusers at all. See even though Samuel Parris was unpopular he still had a few friends. And specifically Parris was close with a family called the Putnams.
BEN KISSEL
Oh yes.
MARCUS PARKS
The Putnams had a 12 year old daughter named Ann Putnam Jr Ann became afflicted herself on the same day that Tituba baked the witch cake.
BEN KISSEL
Uh oh.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I feel a little tremor come on.
BEN KISSEL
Maybe it's puberty.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah? Maybe it's Maybelline.
MARCUS PARKS
She was 12.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Yeah, maybe it's time for me to be a little bit of a witch.
BEN KISSEL
All right, very mature 12 year old I suppose.
MARCUS PARKS
From Putnam Jr the affliction spread to another girl, 17 year old Elizabeth Hubbard. Hubbard worked as a maid for Dr. Griggs.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, Dr. Griggs!
BEN KISSEL
Whoa!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah, you make sure that amp is turned to 11!
BEN KISSEL
Sweet.
MARCUS PARKS
Well Dr. Griggs if you'll remember, he had examined Parris' daughter and niece. He was the one who diagnosed them as living under an evil hand.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You've got to be a witness!
BEN KISSEL
Indeed. And you know Dr. Griggs performed the surgery because he left the little guitar pick inside.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And then he sued for malpractice.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah absolutely. Absolutely ridiculous.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's rock and roll to be sued for malpractice!
BEN KISSEL
I love the Sammy Hagar of doctors.
MARCUS PARKS
Dr. Griggs brought stories of bewitchment home which were undoubtedly heard by his 17 year old servant.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
You wouldn't believe what these little girls did! Twisting around, turning into pretzels in front of my eyes!
BEN KISSEL
Whoa!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I was like, 'What?! Hell no! You got to be witches!'
BEN KISSEL
Do they have pretzels yet?
MARCUS PARKS
Maybe.
BEN KISSEL
Let's see.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
When were pretzels invented?
BEN KISSEL
Cause this is pretzel town this is pretzel area.
MARCUS PARKS
But pretzels are a German thing and these are all English people. Germans haven arrived in America yet as settlers, at least not in any large numbers.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
The year 610.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
No but when did it come to Massachusetts?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I don't know! I can't always be the one with the pretzel-based knowledge!
MARCUS PARKS
Now these two new girls, Ann Putnam Jr and Elizabeth Hubbard, they were among six that were the major accusers during the Salem Witch Trials. It's mostly six girls doing all of this.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
All six besides Ann were between the ages of 17-20 and all but Ann were servants or orphans. These girls were at the very bottom rung of society amongst the free peoples of New England and they had difficult, highly stressful lives of nothing but work from sunup to sundown. They were beaten, one of them like the guy they worked for called her bitch witch all the time, and some were almost certainly sexually abused. Additionally many were also refugees of the frontier war in Maine and showed clear signs of PTSD that could have resulted in the aforementioned conversion disorder when you combine it with fear of the devil.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Everything, when you combine it with everything.
MARCUS PARKS
Everything.
BEN KISSEL
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
But while some of the afflicted were indeed suffering, others were undoubtedly just making shit up and there was precedence for just such an action. One of the most famous cases of witchcraft fraud was that of Anne Gunter in England who almost certainly had a wild fetish for being stuck with needles and pins.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Just call me the pillow.
BEN KISSEL
Oh my goodness. Gunter.
MARCUS PARKS
During her time of accusation, Gunter vomited pins, expelled them from her nose when she sneezed, and sometimes she actually pissed pins out of her urethra.
BEN KISSEL
Jeez. How? How?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cool. It's cool, man. Nowadays that's like a fun burlesque act.
BEN KISSEL
I mean yes if Letterman was still around she'd be like stupid human tricks, look what she can do with her urethra.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, yeah.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
He always featured the urethra.
BEN KISSEL
I know. It sounds very painful though.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. It was said pins came from Gunter's every orifice, her mouth, her butt, her vagina, her ears, her nose, everywhere.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
So stupid.
BEN KISSEL
It sounds like it.
MARCUS PARKS
Pins, pins, pins.
BEN KISSEL
Pins, pins, pins. Yeah, she's a real Albert fish.
MARCUS PARKS
But when Gunter was finally brought before the king she admitted fraud.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I'm making it up. Come on, look at me!
BEN KISSEL
So she didn't have a bunch of pins coming out of her butthole?
MARCUS PARKS
Well it turns out that the whole thing was kind of a plot inspired, or not inspired but was egged on by her father because her father had this rivalry with this other family because he had killed two members of that family during a football game.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, he got his dagger and he punched him in the head with the butt of the dagger a whole bunch of times.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sports have always been hard.
BEN KISSEL
Well that's not really part of the sport though. And I assume you mean football.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, football.
BEN KISSEL
American soccer.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. Now the case was well known in the 17th century because it had occurred in 1605. It was almost a century before Salem but still plays were performed recounting the tale of Anne Gunter.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Pin Pisser. Love that. When they recreate that, when they bring her back into phase 5 of Marvel.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely. Her and Pinhead would make a lovely couple.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah, Pinhead, Pinbottom.
BEN KISSEL
Oh very nice.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Wow. Fun day.
MARCUS PARKS
Oh yeah. Well as such it was not only likely but a certainty that the puritans knew about Anne Gunter. See in the late 17th century New England had the highest literacy rate in the world.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
They all had to know the bible backwards and forwards almost by law. Because how else would you know the pure word of god unless you yourself read the pure word of god?
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I view that as one of the only good things that they did because it was all about putting the power back into the people and not just having someone read at you from a mysterious book from in front of you.
BEN KISSEL
Right. Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah. The literacy rate in New England then was higher than it is now.
BEN KISSEL
Fantastic.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Doing well.
BEN KISSEL
Great.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Doing good.
MARCUS PARKS
But since damn near everyone down to the servants knew how to read at least a little bit back then, the Anne Gunter fraud story would have been known and that was in addition to the widespread availability of quote unquote "real" witchcraft cases. Concerning fraud and the afflicted in Salem though, there were certainly people in 1692 who thought the cases were fraudulent from the start. One person said that he heard an afflicted girl admit that she did it quote "for sport because we must have some sport".
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cool. Very Fairuza Balk.
BEN KISSEL
Oh yes.
MARCUS PARKS
This meant that some of the girls accused innocent people of witchcraft just for the kicks and kept doing it even after people started dying. And it's with those girls and the flood of accusations to come that we'll pick back up for part two of the Salem Witch Trials!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah baby! Hell is real!
BEN KISSEL
It's amazing how many people have been saved because of basketball.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It really is.
BEN KISSEL
Gosh. All right.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
But next week man, we're gonna get deeper into the history of the infernal which I'm very excited about.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We're going to get some detail of what makes you a witch, what happens when you are a witch, how do you get in that club?
BEN KISSEL
Yes indeed.
MARCUS PARKS
Yep. And how did Salem get so fucking bad, so fucking fast? That's fascinating to me.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
But yeah, we're going to get into the accusations next week, we'll probably get into the trials the week after that. And of course executions.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
They're just kind of peppered throughout.
BEN KISSEL
Yes.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That's gonna be our favorite part isn't it?
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah those are peppered throughout because hanging in New England in 1692 was not a fun business.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
BEN KISSEL
Not at all. All right everyone, thank you so much for listening. Episode 500.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We did it.
MARCUS PARKS
We did it.
BEN KISSEL
I hope you enjoyed it. Thank you so much for being on this journey with us.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah man.
BEN KISSEL
Wow.
MARCUS PARKS
It's insane that we're still doing this.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. We are still doing it.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
And honestly I have a renewed sense of love and joy for it.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
MARCUS PARKS
As do I. After I finished the script yesterday, I did the snap clap thing that I used to do when I finished a script.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
MARCUS PARKS
I go snap and then I clap and I go yeah!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Cool. I mean that's good.
BEN KISSEL
He's a cool guy.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I took a full dump in the middle on our little break and it was really nice.
MARCUS PARKS
That's great.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
Awesome, all right.
MARCUS PARKS
You said you were only going to urinate but you took a dump instead.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yep.
BEN KISSEL
Isn't that something special? Okay everyone. Well thank you for listening, thanks for supporting all the shows. We're going to be in Europe real soon.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Real soon. It's gonna happen real soon. And then we are in Philadelphia, on August 13th I believe.
BEN KISSEL
I can't wait.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
That will be fun. And can't wait to see you. Australia.
MARCUS PARKS
Psychofest as well in Las Vegas on the 19th I think.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Oh yeah. Vegas baby!
BEN KISSEL
Psychofest is gonna be awesome. All right everyone, thanks so much for supporting all the shows here. What's up, Marcus?
MARCUS PARKS
One more thing, don't forget our cruiser is for presale I believe now at prioritybikes.com.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Sure.
MARCUS PARKS
It's a super fucking cool bike. I ride priority bikes myself, they make a solid product.
BEN KISSEL
Okay.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
I've seen it and it's a cool bike.
MARCUS PARKS
It's a super cool bike.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
It's very dark.
MARCUS PARKS
Yeah.
BEN KISSEL
It's a bicycle. Okay everyone, thank you so much for listening. Hail yourselves!
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Hail Satan!
MARCUS PARKS
Hail Gein.
BEN KISSEL
Megustalations.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Today honestly you just gotta be careful. If you're a witch, good.
MARCUS PARKS
Good.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
We want you to be one.
BEN KISSEL
Remember where you come from.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Yeah. Remember.
BEN KISSEL
Absolutely.
HENRY ZEBROWSKI
Fight for your sisters always.