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It all started in late January of 1692 when Elizabeth Parris and Abigail Williams began to exhibit strange behavior, such as screaming, convulsive seizures, and trance-like states. Modern physicians were led to believe that these girls were under the influence of Satan. Reverend Samuel Parris held prayer services meant to reveal the identity of witches that were afflicting the girls. Magistrates John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin examined several girls and made accusations against numbers of people. Rebecca Nurse, Susannah Martin, Sarah Good, Sarah Wildes, and Elizabeth Howe were tried, condemned and then executed, for witchcraft. Most of these girls were under the age of eighteen and few were under twelve years old.
Salem Witchcraft is described to the reader to understand that witches were actually put on trial, and then when accused; they were hung in the gallows near Salem Massachusetts. Those would be executed if admissible evidence was given by one of the following ways: 1) self-incriminating testimony, 2) inability to say the lords prayer without error, 3) discovery of the devil's mark, (a small red circle) 4) the pin test to see if the devil's mark would bleed, if it did not hurt or bleed, people believed the devil caused it, and lastly 5) the touch test, the accused would touch the afflicted while in their fits. This touch test was believed that if the fit stopped when the accused person touched the afflicted person, then supposedly the accused person had been the original cause of the fit. .
Wilson narrates that many historians who wrote about the Salem Witch Trials were appalled by the events that actually happened. Historians of the 1800's tell what they have discovered, and what really happened, and whether or not it was witchcraft or a condition that altered attention in an individual, known to us as supernatural or supernormal power. Reverend Cotton Mathers wrote the book, Wonders of the Invisible World it focuses on the trials he did not attend.