how it got started

In 1688, John Putnam. invited Samuel Parris to preach to the village church. During the Winter of 1692 the daughter of Samuel parris(Betty Parris) became strangely ill. The symptoms led the town to believe the illness was caused by convulsive ergotism, caused by ingesting rye- eaten as cereal or bread.Around the same time Cotton Mather published a book explaining witchcraft and Betty's behavior resembled the stuff being done in the book. The town started to believe that it was witchcraft when a few of her friends got the same illness. They brought in a doctor who diagnosed it as a supernatural origin. Samuel Parris' neighbor baked a cake with the ingredients; of rye and the patients urine and fed it to dogs because they believed that dogs were used by witches as agents to carry out their devilish commands. Tituba(a friend of theirs) has told the girls stories about unnatural stuff and it led them to believe Tituba was taking part in witchcraft.

The number of girls becoming I'll became overwhelming and they "turned themselves from a circle of friends into a gang of juvenile delinquents." The girls. complained about being bitten and pinched, in a village where everyone believed that the devil was real, close at hand, and the suspected affliction of the girls became an obsession. Sometime after Tituba made the cake, her and two other people received arrest warrants, and the witchhunts began. The first three people to be accused of witchcraft where Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborn. Tituba admitted that she saw a tall figure that looked like a dog(Satan) and had asked her to sign his book and do his work. Therefore Tituba declared she was a witch and tried to tell Reverend Parris but the devil blocked her path. She also admitted that her, Good, and Osborn flew around on poles, as people had earlier reported. Sarah Goods child, at the age of four was the first child accused of witchcraft. From this point on It was trial, after trial, after trial, until they killed 20 people caused of doing the devils work.