Word: witched
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...arrests and trials went on and as spring lengthened into summer, the executions began. On June 10, the first witch was hanged on Salem's Gallows Hill. In July, five went to their deaths on the gallows, in August five more, and on a single day in September, eight men and women were hanged. Contrary to the legends which surround the trials, no witch was ever burned in Massachusetts. The only deviation from the hanging procedure same in the case of an 81-year-old man, Giles Cory. Arraigned on witchcraft charges before the Salem court, Cory steadfastly refused...
...just emerging from a period of extreme anxiety. Only a few years before, in the last years of England's ill-fated James II, the colony had lost its precious charter and had felt the weight of royal autocracy under the governorship of Sir Edmund Andros. Even as the witch craze began, Massachusetts representatives were at the court of the new King, seeking a new charter. And the memory of King Phillip's War, with its horrors of Indian savagery, was still fresh in many New England minds...
...story of Increase Mather's courageous fight for deconey and sanity, history adds a bizarre note of irony. A few years after the trials, a book appeared in Boston which denounced Cotton Mather, Increase's son, for his part in the Salem witch-hunts. But although Cotton's son, for his part in the Salem witch-hunts. But although Cotton's role had, in fact, been at best a rather ambiguous one. Increase reseswiftly and violently to his son's defense. Legend has it that a curious ceremony took place in Cambridge a few days after the appearance...
...colony to which Mather now returned was in a turmoil over the great witch-hunt, which continued unabated; still no voice of authority had been raised against the trials. It would be pleasant to report that Increase Mather immediately flamed with indignation at the witchcraft craze, but the issue hardly seemed to rouse him at first. His long-neglected duties at Harvard absorbed his attention and he apparently saw no reason to question the verdicts of the duly-constituted authorities of the colony, men for the most part trained and educated at Harvard College...
...Governor Phips pardoned 150 people who had been imprisoned on witchcraft charges. The fury of the mania subsided as quickly as it had come, when Puritan good sense re-asserted itself. Soon the witchcraft trials were but an ugly memory, though Puritanism has never lost the stigma which the witch-hunts placed...