The city of Salem, Massachusetts is a charming little seaport with beautiful old homes and a spooky history. I have loved this city from a very young age and was fortunate to move there in my twenties and stay for many years.
But I had never known there was any familial connection to Salem. Imagine my surprise in 2022 to find my ancestors remains all over Salem, on both my mother’s mother’s Polish side and her father’s English side, in St Mary’s Catholic Cemetery and the beautiful Greenlawn Cemetery which has a Victorian park-like atmosphere in the style of the great landscape architect Frederick Law Olmstead.
By far the most interesting thing I found was the association my family had to the Salem Witch Trials, a connection I never knew existed...
To be honest, the link is a bit tenuous. I haven’t found any hanged witches or possessed tweens in my past (yet!)
Instead, the connection comes from the testimony of Reverend John Hale in the trial of Bridget Bishop.
The story is shocking, graphic and heartbreaking:
It begins on my mother’s paternal side: Her father’s 5th great grandparents were Joseph Trask and Elizabeth Sallows Trask, who were married in Salem in 1693, the year following the witchcraft hysteria. Joseph’s father was Osmond Trask (1622-1676). Osmond was also the father of John Trask by his first wife, making John and Joseph half brothers.
Four years before Joseph and Elizabeth married in Salem, and three years before the witch hysteria happened there, a tragedy befell the Trask family: John’s wife Christian Woodbury Trask (1661-1689) committed suicide at the young age of 28:
Wife of John Trask of Salem, “being violently asalted by the temtations of satan, cut her owne throte with a paire of sisers to the astonishment and grief of all, especially her most nere relations.” “Early Vital Records of Massachusetts (Beverly Deaths)”
The reverend John Hale testified of her grisly and morbid death:
As to the wounds she dyed of I observed 3 deadly ones; a piece of her wind pipe cut out & another wound above that through the windpipe & gullet & the vein they call jugular. So that I then judge & still do apprehend it impossible for her with so short a pair of scissars to mangle herself so without some extraordinary work of the devil or witchcraft.
That testimony comes from the trial of Bridget Bishop in 1692. She was an accused witch and some of the evidence against her was the suicide three years earlier of Christian Trask. Christian and Bridget were neighbors and had a difficult relationship, with Christian often admonishing Bridget for not being pious enough. Bridget was an inn keeper and didn't obey the societal norms of puritan Salem. She fought in public, hosted drinking parties and wore a red bodice. She was an easy target for the possessed girls of Salem, and the adults who used them for their own vengeance. Bridget was one of the first to be accused of witchcraft.
In court, John Hale's testimony that Bridget Bishop had bewitched Christian to commit the act of slicing her own throat with a pair of dull scissors three years earlier helped to seal her fate.
The testimony against Bridget Bishop, which also included spectral evidence and poppets (a kind of voodoo doll) was convincing enough to send her to Gallows Hill. She was the first person executed for witchcraft in Salem on June 10, 1692.
