Part 26

Braybrook's statement presents a side incident at a time when none of the performers who had been trained in the historian's famous high school for girls were present--an incident which rivals in marvelousness anything in the main tragedy they are charged with enacting. When the tricksy girls were all absent, when men alone stood guard over and were with this prisoner, she became invisible by them. No one of the magic-working band of girls and women was then at hand. Testimony that she disappeared is distinct; the guards reported in the morning that "she was gone some time from them." The constable so stated, and the statement was supported by two assistant guards, Michael Dunnell, and Jonathan Baker. We shall not stop to ask them how they knew that she was "barefoot and barelegged" when she was invisible. They perhaps saw her stockings and shoes when she was not to be seen. Also she was without such garments when seen that night by Elizabeth Hubbard and her lover in that girl's distant home.

An intelligent, sagacious, and reliable man, Dr. H. B. Storer, of Boston, whom we know and have long known personally, and whom we respect as being distinctly high-minded, honorable, and adherent to facts and truths, gave, in the Banner of Light, January 9, 1875, an instructive account of his recent observations at the residence of Mrs. Compton, a medium, at Havana, N. Y. We extract the following from his statements. He says that on Monday morning, December 28, 1874,--

"By my request, Mrs. Compton acquiescing without a murmur, my lady friends, entering her bedroom, saw her completely divested of clothing, with the exception of two under garments, and then had her draw on a pair of her husband's pantaloons. The basque of her alpaca dress, without the skirt, was then put on, after careful search to render it certain that no extra clothing could be secreted. Then, in my presence, the basque was sewed by its points on each side to the pantaloons, and a ribbon, which I tied with two knots closely around her neck, was sewed through the knots, and each end of the ribbon sewed to the collar of the basque. So she had on a closely-fitting coat and pantaloons sewed together, and so attached by a ribbon around the neck that the clothing could not be drawn up or down. A pair of black gloves were then drawn upon the hands and sewed tightly around the wrists. I then put around her waist a piece of cotton twine, tying it in two hard knots behind, and the same piece of twine was tied by double knots to the back of the chair in which she sat."

On Saturday Dr. Storer had seen come forth from the cabinet, as Dr. F. L. H. Willis also had on a former occasion, "a weird phantom, bearing the semblance of a woman, and clothed in a flowing costume of white. Over her head was thrown a vail of delicate texture, and in one hand she carried a handkerchief that looked like a bit of a fleecy cloud. Her dress was exceedingly white and lustrous, without a wrinkle or a fold in it." That description by Willis is called by Storer "perfect," and is adopted by him. This "weird" personage was called Katie. Dr. Storer, after fixing the medium in the cabinet on Monday, as above described, says,--

"Very slowly the door [of the cabinet] opened, and soon her [Katie's] entire form was seen dressed exactly as before--trailing skirts, vail, and mantle, but with a belt which she gathered in her hands and rubbed together that we might hear its silken rustle. Standing by the door, she addressed me, saying that when she had walked entirely away from the cabinet, she wished me to go in quickly, and, without moving the chair, feel after the medium, and all about the cabinet, and see if I could find her. She stepped out about five feet into the room, and at once I sprang into the cabinet, felt in the chair, swept the floor and walls thoroughly with my hands--but--not a vestige of medium or anything remained."

The italicizing is ours. We design to imitate the doctor in both frankness and wisdom--to restate and accept his facts--but make no attempt at explanation of them. We adduce the case because it parallels in marvelousness the statements of Braybrook. What happens now may have had its like before to-day. The modern case out-marvels, perhaps, the ancient one; for we know not whether the guards felt for their prisoner or only failed to see her. How they ascertained that she was gone is not told. Dr. Storer felt the chair into which he had bound Mrs. Compton, felt the floor and the ceiling all over, and could find nobody in the little cabinet, which was but a triangle partitioned off at the corner of the room, whose inner sides were only five feet each in length, so that a man, without changing his position, might touch any part of it, unless the ceiling overhead was above the man's reach. Shortly afterward, says Dr. Storer, "the cabinet door was opened, and in the chair, tied as we had left her, without the breaking of a thread, or the apparent movement of her person, or in any respect differing from her appearance when last seen, sat the medium, in that fearfully lifeless trance, from which nearly a half hour was required to arouse her. I will not give any speculations of my own upon this most marvelous exhibition. I submit the facts and vouch for their entire accuracy."

Were Braybrook's statements true as to the main fact? They may have been. If they were, we do not apprehend that the physical body of Sarah Good was either removed from the vicinity of her guards, or seen by Elizabeth Hubbard that night. Invisibility may have been wrapped around her body, and yet not around her shoes and stockings; perhaps her spirit-form was the only one seen by the distant observer. We hesitate to fix limits to possibilities. Spirits to-day frequently manage, as they say, and as results indicate, to render particular material objects lying within the embrace of auras or emanations of some mediums, invisible temporarily by the keenest of keen external eyes, even when such eyes are surrounded by light sufficient for seeing other objects in the vicinity with distinctness. That which is done now may have been done formerly. And since such phenomena now seldom occur excepting in the near vicinity of persons susceptible to spirit influences, the fair conclusion is, that Sarah Good was a medium. Elizabeth Hubbard saw the spirit-form of Sarah Good; which fact argues that Elizabeth was a clairvoyant, unless Sarah Good's spirit was then materialized. Each and every one of the afflicted girls is so repeatedly reported to have described perception of what external sight could not see, external ear hear, nor external touch feel, that the mediumistic susceptibilities of each and all of them are manifest.

The susceptibilities and endowments of both accusers and accused were exceptional and yet alike in kind. The spiritual perceptive faculties and the receptive capabilities of both classes could be brought into such action as would out-work results perceptible by the external senses of common people. Also, and especially, each class could be made to serve as mere tools of invisible beings. As such they were handled, their users employing them severally as afflictor or as afflicted, at their pleasure, within the permissions of psychological laws.

The choice, which selected certain ones to be implements by which to afflict, and others to be the subjects of afflictions, was made by dwellers in spirit spheres, familiar with psychological laws, and competent to determine in which capacity each impressible one could be most serviceable in advancing the ends of the supernal operators. Such a view, when its correctness shall have been confirmed, will work out vast amelioration in the world's judgment of that band of girls and women in Salem Village who have long borne its scorn and detestation, and will thrill every kindly heart with joy. When it shall become apparent that some inborn physical peculiarities involved the controlling reasons why certain persons rather than others were charged with being Satan's devotees, then none can fail to see that it was not roguery, not artifice, not malice, not grudges, not family or neighborhood or parochial quarrels, not disputes about property, nor any social, moral, or religious eminence or debasement,--no, not any one of those base motives of the normal intellect and heart which lively fancy has pleased itself with conjuring up and imputing,--no, it was not any one of those reprehensible and damning motives, but was innate susceptibility of being easily controlled by psychological forces; especially it was a constitutional liability to be more readily seen, heard, and felt by persons similarly endowed than was the great mass of people around them.

Ann Putnam, Jr., the keen-sighted pioneer of the clairvoyant witch-detectors, saw the apparition, and felt the distressing influences of Sarah Good, on the 25th of February. Her depositions were numerous; there were but few of the accused whose apparitions had not met her vision, but few who had not harmed her in ways and by forces unperceived by external senses. The character and general purport of her testimony, and also of most of the testimony from members of THE CIRCLE, is well presented by the first deposition we find on record; which is as follows:--

"The deposition of Ann Putnam, Jr., who testifieth and saith, that on the 25th of February, 1691-92, I saw the apparition of Sarah Good, which did torture me most grievously; but I did not know her name till the 27th of February, and then she told me her name was Sarah Good. And then she did pinch me most grievously; and also since; several times urging me vehemently to write in her book. And also on the 1st of March, being the day of her examination, Sarah Good did most grievously torture me; and also several times since. And also on the first day of March, 1692, I saw the apparition of Sarah Good go and afflict and torture the bodies of Elizabeth Parris, Abigail Williams, and Elizabeth Hubbard. Also I have seen the apparition of Sarah Good afflicting the body of Sarah Vibber.

mark "ANN PUTNAM." +

That deposition furnishes a fair specimen of the kind of evidence sought for, admitted, and applied to prove probable compact with the devil. All of the above pertains to the first examination made at Salem, and it reveals the opinions then prevalent relating to covenantings with the Evil One, to powers and dispositions thence derived, and to then existing legal methods for proving such compacts. There is little indication that experiences at Salem, during the spring and summer of 1692, gave either the examining magistrates, or the court, much, if any, new light or any increase of wisdom or humaneness. Whatever modification of processes of procedure subsequently took place, and whatever change of decisions as to the value and admissibility of spectral evidence occurred, was for the worse rather than the better. The creeds and laws conformed to then were not formed and adopted for that occasion, but had prior existence, and were here applied with strenuous vigor by firm hearts and clear heads. Amid all the excitement, frenzy, infatuation, delusion, and credulity then abounding, logic retained its power and guidance, and held courts and juries to the requirements of the wholesome statutes of the English Parliament, pertaining to witchcraft and to Christendom's witchcraft creed. Old laws and faiths were here tested by strong men. They held for a time, and wrought woeful effects, but finally were broken.

Sarah Good was wife of an inefficient husband, "William Good, laborer." The family was very poor, having at times no home excepting such as charity granted them temporarily. She is spoken of by Calef as having "long been accounted a melancholy or distracted woman." Upham says that "she was a forlorn, friendless, and forsaken creature, broken down by wretchedness of condition and ill repute." We find no reason for dissenting from that writer's statement when he says elsewhere, that "she was an unfortunate and miserable woman in her circumstances and condition;" but we doubt the fitness of calling her "forlorn" and "broken down." She may have been so; but the spirit and energy generally manifested by her words and acts indicate the probability that she was rather a heedless, bold woman, free and harsh in the use of her tongue, and not very sensitive to or regardful of public opinion, but yet strong and not despondent. That she may have long been deemed, as Calef says she was, a "distracted" woman, is very probable, for many simply mediumistic persons, and even more of us who at this day solely because we believe in the advent of spirits, both good and less good, have long been accounted crazy.

We have met with no indication that she was physically weak or mentally despondent. She seems to have borne up well under long, tedious horseback rides daily to and from Ipswich jail, nine or ten miles distant, whither she was nightly sent ever after the time of her becoming invisible to her guards. Her keeper on the way says, "she leaped off her horse three times, railed at the magistrates, and endeavored to kill herself." That attempt, if she made one, to take her own life, was scarcely less likely to spring from the angry mental mood then prompting her to rail against the magistrates, than from despondency or forlornness.

When under examination, her answers were about as direct, explicit, and to the point, as most other suspected ones were able to give to the perplexing questions which were put; and some of hers have more snap than we usually find in words from lips of the "forlorn and broken down."

It is not probable that her previous life had won much public favor; yet no evidence has been met with that her neighbors generally cherished hostile feelings towards her, or possessed sentiments which would prompt them to rejoice at her prosecution. We, as has already been made apparent, ascribe her arrest to other causes than the lowness of her character and condition. That was not the primal incentive to her being "cried out upon." Her organization, and the then existing condition of her faculties, made her either a convenient channel through which to transmit, or a fountain from which to draw, forces into the systems of certain other sensitives, which forces might act therein for either the annoyance and suffering, or the pleasure and relief of the recipients, according to either inherent properties of the forces themselves, or to the purpose of some intelligence who should inflow and manipulate them. The sensitive girls might, and, if well unfolded mediumistically, would unerringly trace back such forces as acted upon themselves to their mundane point of emanation, and in good conscience and good faith accuse the person from whom the forces issued of being their tormentor; if clairvoyant they could see, if clairaudient could hear, and, if not specially unfolded for seeing with the inner eye and hearing with the inner ear, could sense the person from whom the foreign and disturbing influences came forth.

A bold spirit and prophetic glance pertained to this woman at the close of her mortal life. When near the gallows, and about to be executed, Mr. Noyes, the clergyman at Salem proper, told her "she was a witch, and she knew that she was a witch." She promptly retorted, "You are a liar. I am no more a witch than you are a wizard; and if you take away my life, God will give you blood to drink." Subsequently that man "died of an internal hemorage, bleading profusely at the mouth." (Hist. of Witchcraft, vol. ii. p. 270.) Gleamings of what will be often meet internal or mediumistic eyes; and such probably did those of Sarah Good at that instant, and authorized her prophetic utterance.

DORCAS GOOD

has already been presented in the reports of evidence against her mother; but in those she was called Dorothy, and was reported as testifying that her mother "had three birds, one black, one yellow, and that these birds hurt the children, and afflicted persons." Such testimony, of course, supported the side of the accusers. The little one's words were damaging to her mother, and helpful to the mother's oppressors. But, from some cause, she soon fell under suspicion of belonging to the class of bewitchers. As early as March 3, Ann Putnam saw the apparition of this child; and on the 21st of March, Mary Walcott did the same. This, of course, was regarded as evidence that she was a witch; and on or near March 23d she was arrested, examined, and soon after sent to jail.

Yes, little Dorcas, daughter of mediumistic Sarah Good, not five years old, "looking well and hale as other children," was definitely, in legal form, accused of witchcraft; was arrested, and brought before the civil magistrates for examination. In presence of the magistrates the exhibiting graduates from the school of "necromancy, magic, and spiritualism"--the afflicted girls--accused the little child of biting them then and there, and "also of pricking them with pins, with pinching and almost choking them." In proof of all this they exhibited marks upon their flesh, just such in size and form as matched her little teeth Also pins were found under their clothing precisely where they asserted that she pricked them.

Such facts as imprints upon the arms of the girls, corresponding precisely with such as the child's teeth might make, and the invisible pinchings, prickings, &c., are not outside of nature's permissions, and therefore were not impossible. Those girls, at their circle meetings, or elsewhere, had obviously become very facile instruments in spiritualism, had become usable by spirits as subjects for impressions, and psychologically induced sensations. From the mediumistic little daughter of a mediumistic mother, forms and forces could be made to emanate which might act upon the plastic mediumistic sufferers in exact accordance with such experiences, and producing such results as the girls described or others witnessed. The senses of the annoyed ones could distinctly perceive that the agonizing forces issued from that little girl. The accusers probably stated only facts which they knew as well as any witness ever knew his facts when describing what his own senses had brought him knowledge of. Whether things seen and felt by the spirit senses be deemed objective or only subjective, they are alike real to the consciousness of the person that takes cognizance of them. The statements of the girls were probably true. The possibilities in heaven and earth, and along where their border-lines come in contact, are not recognized by some historians. There are some persons at this day who hold even as contracting and misleading philosophies, as Cotton Mather and the men of his generation did. Modern wisdom (?) prompts some to discredit any actual occurrence of any extra-marvelous facts--any facts seeming more than natural--and to impeach the accuracy or the truthfulness of any and all who attest to such, rather than admit that the bases of their own philosophies can be improved by expansion. Such persons, when attempting to account for many facts in human history, are, though it may be unconsciously to themselves, like mill-horses tethered to an unchanging center, and made to move within a fixed circumference. Habit soon brings loss of desire, if not of courage, to turn the eyes outward and look upon facts whose producers work from outside the beaten rounds in which some theorists travel. This makes it bad for many facts, such facts as are popping into view through avenues deemed anomalous. There are writers who do their best to enforce upon such facts the Mosaic command, "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live." But facts are immortal; buried ones often reappear, and demonstrate their own former occurrence.

Two centuries ago, the claim of great marvels to be objective facts was generally conceded. But at that time the hidden workers of wonders were woefully slandered as to parentage: men deemed them all to be both imps of the malignant ruler of the darkest regions of realms unseen, and his emissaries from pandemonium to the abodes of man.

Faith in the genuineness of witchcraft facts, though in Dorcas Good's day it hid a multitude of sins, failed to make the arresting of a mere infant witch a desirable operation. For some reason the officious marshal, Herrick, sent forth constable Braybrook to encounter and capture man's great enemy when that wily one had ensconced himself in an infant's form. But the deputy scavengered up and sub-deputized somebody else to fight that battle for God and Christ. His menial went the needful two or three miles north through the woods to Benjamin Putnam's house, and executed the daring feat of bringing on his back, or in some other way, a "hale and well-looking" girl of less than five years into court, a culprit because of co-laboring with and being a covenanted servant of witchcraft's devil! The darkness of delusion which such an arrest failed to illumine must have been thick indeed! But the creed of the day, devil-ward, the creed of the fathers, the creed of Christendom, so deluded the public judgment that it demanded the blood of a witch even though she were an infant.

The condition of the public mind only a very short time subsequent to the irrational, unkindly, barbarous arrest of that child has been depicted by Upham, vol. ii. p. 112, in sentences more graphic, spirited, and eloquent than our own powers could possibly put forth, and differing considerably from what we would essay to give were our rhetorical abilities equal to his. He states that--

"The proceedings of the 11th and 12th of April produced a great effect in driving on the general infatuation.... 'Twas awful to see how the afflicted persons were agitated.... Those girls, by long practice in 'the circle,' and day by day before the astonished and wondering neighbors gathered to witness their distresses, and especially on the more public occasions of the examinations, had acquired consummate boldness and tact. In simulations of passions, sufferings, and physical affections; in sleight of hand, and the management of voice and feature and attitude, no necromancers have surpassed them. There has seldom been better acting in a theater than they displayed in the presence of the astonished and horror-stricken rulers, magistrates, ministers, judges, jurors, spectators, and prisoners. No one seems to have dreamed that their actings and sufferings could have been the result of cunning or imposture. Deodat Lawson was a man of talents, had seen much of the world, and was by no means a simpleton, recluse, or novice; but he was totally deluded by them. The prisoners, although conscious of their own innocence, were utterly confounded by the acting of the girls. The austere principles of that generation forbade with the utmost severity all theatrical shows and performances; but at Salem village and the old town, in the respective meeting-houses, and at Deacon Nathaniel Ingersoll's, some of the best playing ever got up in this country was practiced, and patronized for weeks and months at the very centre and heart of Puritanism, by 'the most straitest sect' of that solemn order of men. Pastors, deacons, church-members, doctors of divinity, college professors, officers of state, crowded, day after day, to behold feats which have never been surpassed on the boards of any theater; which rivaled the most memorable achievements of pantomimists, thaumaturgists, and stage-players, and made considerable approaches toward the best performances of ancient sorcerers and magicians, or modern jugglers and mesmerizers."

The brilliancy, fervor, and literary finish of that description of the public enthusiasm and bewilderment are truly worthy of admiration, while the picture is not, and probably could not be, overwrought. Still we must doubt the competency of the alleged authors of the excitement to perform the bewildering and frenzying acts ascribed to them.

We have heard from of old, and could quasi believe, that mountains in labor brought forth mice. But it is only rarely one has earnestly and fervently sought and striven to entice the reading public to admit conviction that a dozen enceinte mice could enwomb and give birth to a vast and terrific volcano.