It’s pretty close to insanity, isn’t it? The Salem Witch Trials, I mean. It all started in Massachusetts during the spring of 1692, by a group of young girls in Salem Village claiming to be possessed by the devil, accusing several of the local women of being witches and casting spells on them. I guess if you didn’t have current technology, like being able to type “are witches real” into a search engine, you really might not know what to think about the whole situation.
The first “witch” to be convicted was Bridget Bishop, she was hung to her death. Over 170 more people were convicted following the incident. Often times they would judge these witches using unjust methods; such as putting them in water in weights attached to their ankles, and if they floated, they would be hung because that meant they were witches, or, if they sunk, they would die. It was a lose-lose. Terrible stuff.
After years of this atrocity, they court finally apologized and offered restitution to the victims’ families. This isn’t the first and certainly not the last instance of profiling and unjust sentencing in our society, but it will forever be remembered, nonetheless. For example, there are staggering parallels between the Salem Witch Trials and modern day “witch hunting,” like the McCarthy hearings in 1950.
