When persons arraigned for specific offences plead guilty, their pleas generally are deemed conclusive evidence that the accused have performed the special deeds set forth in the allegations. Many of the accused in witchcraft times made statements which have ever since been called confessions. Inference from that has long been general and wide-spread, that nearly such witchcraft as the creed of our fathers specified had positive manifestation in their day. But we seriously doubt whether any record of statements made by an accused one exhibits distinct admission that he or she had entered into covenant with that devil which one must have been in league with to become such a witch or wizard as the laws against witchcraft were intended to arrest.

Such confessions as were recorded may have been true in the main, but they fall short of confessions of the special crime alleged; they amount to little, if anything, more than admissions and statements that the confessors had seen, been influenced by, and had acted in company with apparitions or spirits all of whom were of earthly origin, and were members of the human family; they confessed only to being, or to having been at times, clairvoyants.

The circumstances under which even such confessions were generally made, need to be carefully viewed before just estimate can be placed upon the worth and significance of the recorded statements.

Hutchinson supposed that “those who were condemned and not executed, all confessed their guilt,” ... and that “the most effectual way to prevent an accusation” (of one’s self) “was to become an accuser.” Strange—strange—and yet obviously true. An accused one, then, could look for escape from death—the legal penalty of witchcraft—only by pleading guilty to the charge. Confession of guilt, and nothing else, then, purchased exemption from capital punishment. This becoming obvious, all natural instincts for preservation of one’s life, and all possible entreaties, urgings, and commands of friends and relatives, forcibly tended to extort confession even from the innocent. Husband or wife, children, parents, brothers, sisters, and trusted advisers, often all conspired in urging an accused one to plead guilty—yes, even a condemned one, for that plea was as efficacious after conviction and sentence as before. It is said that many did confess. Confessed to what? Never to having made a covenant with the great witchcraft devil nor any formidable imp of his, but generally to clairvoyant visions, to mental meetings with the specters of friends, neighbors, and other embodied mortals, and to some compacts and co-operative labors with such personages,—never with the devil. They did not confess to witchcraft itself as then defined. The clear-headed Mary Easty besought the magistrates “to try some of the confessing witches, I being confident there is several of them has belied themselves and others.” Her clear and calm brain perceived the broad distinction existing between clairvoyance and witchcraft. So, too, did Martha and Giles Corey, Jacobs, Proctor, Susanna Martin, George Burroughs, and others; these, and such as these, did not confess, while many weaker and more ignorant ones did.

Little Sarah Carrier, only eight years old, whose testimony we adduced in part, when presenting the case of her mother, throws much light upon some confessions of that day. Simon Willard, who wrote out and attested to “the substance” of her statements, heads his record, “Sarah Carrier’s Confession, August 11th.” The girl’s confession? No; it was simply a frank statement of facts in her own experience, which lets us know that when she was about six years old her own mother made her a witch, and baptized her. But “the devil, or black man, was not there, as she saw,” when she was made a witch. She afflicted folks by pinching them; went to those whom she afflicted; but went only “in her spirit.” Her mother was the only devil who bewitched her, and the only being whom her baptism bound her to serve. Such was her witchcraft. That plain statement is refreshing and valuable. It shows that when about six years old this mediumistic girl had become so developed that her spirit could commune with her mother’s, independently of their bodies. She then became a conscious clairvoyant, and could trace felt influences, issuing from her mother, back to their source. Thenceforth mother and daughter could conjointly place themselves on the green at Salem Village, ten miles off, or in any pasture or any house whither thought might lead them. The mother’s stronger mind had but to wish, and the child must go with her and do her bidding; and when the two were in rapport, any stronger spirit controlling the mother could make the child co-operative in pinchings or any other inflictions of pains. Because the little girl had set her hand to a red book presented by her own mother, and thus, by implication, bound herself to be obedient to that mother, her statement of the fact was labeled a confession of witchcraft, and deemed damaging to her mother. Three or four other children of Mrs. Carrier were able to sense spirit scenes. Her home was a domestic school of prophets, and her own children were apt pupils in it. Her moral character and influence do not here concern us.

Abigail Faulkner was condemned, and two of her children, “Dorothy ten, and Abigail eight years old, testified that their mother appeared and made them witches.” That mother was daughter of Rev. Francis Dane of Andover, some of whose other children and grandchildren were accused, which suggests, though it fails to prove, that much medianimic susceptibility was imparted through either him or his wife, or both, to their offspring. His descendants attracted the notice of clairvoyants. Hutchinson states that Mr. Dane himself “is tenderly touched in several of the examinations, which” (the tenderness?) “might be owing to a fair character; and he may be one of the persons accused who” (the accusation of whom) “caused a discouragement to further prosecutions.” “He,” being then “near fourscore, seems to have been in danger.” Internal luminosity and copious radiations from their interior forms probably rendered Rev. Mr. Dane, Rev. Samuel Willard, Mrs. Hale, wife of the minister at Beverly, Mrs. Phips, wife of the governor, and many others of high character or standing, visible by mediumistic optics, and presentible apparitionally where spirits were wont to congregate, consult and manipulate instruments for acting out—not for learning—the “wonders of necromancy, magic, and Spiritualism.”

Witch meetings, as they were called, or congregated spirits or apparitions on the green, or in the pasture of the minister at Salem Village, are mentioned more frequently and with more particularity and concordant specifications, than would naturally be looked for if they had no basis on fact. That Spirits in vast crowds have more than once been seen in modern times by a seer looking up from High Rock in Lynn, can be learned by perusal of A. J. Davis’s visions there. But he was the observer of departed ones only, while the apparent personages at witch meetings of old were partly either the spirits of embodied persons or their apparitions. The fact of apparitions being present thereat in those days proved the persons themselves apparitionally seen to be the devil’s allies. Some confessors of witchcraft intended to verify the truth of their statements by describing whom they had seen, and what they had observed at such meetings. And it is not without interest that some people now read confessions like the following from Ann Foster of Andover, viz.: “That she was at the meeting of the witches at Salem Village when about twenty-five were present; that Goody Carrier came and told her of the meeting and would have her go, and so they got upon sticks and went the said journey, and being there did see Mr. Burroughs the minister, who spake to them all;... that they were presently at the Village,” when they rode on the “stick or pole”; and that she heard some of the witches say that there were three hundred and five in the whole country, and that they would ruin that place—the Village. Also that there was present at that meeting two men besides Mr. Burroughs, the minister, and one of them had gray hair.

Not without interest are such things read, because they prompt to fancyings of things possible in an unseen sphere which hangs over and enfolds all mortals. Could Ann Foster’s gray-haired man have been Tituba’s white-haired visitant—the originator and enactor of Salem witchcraft? Who knows? Could not he and such as he have searched out and numbered many persons in the land who were adapted to be facile instruments for his use, and found three hundred and five in all? Had not his will power to call instantly together, that is, to arrest and concentrate the attention of as many of them as were at the moment impressible by him, either directly or through other plastic mortals, from any part of the region between the Penobscot and the Hudson, or even further, and thus collect a band, that is, arrest and fix the attention, of twenty-five of them, more or less, to whom inklings of his plans for the future might be given, and whose relative rank, efficiency, or importance could be foreshadowed? Through either unconscious apparitions or conscious spirits of mortals, or of both classes commingled, might he not enact scenes which it pleased him to have certain witnesses behold, and to proclaim, so far as he judged best, his purposes, his doctrines, or aught else it should be his pleasure to divulge or enforce? Possibly. Those witch meetings may have been much more than mere fictions.

We will look now at other and quite different confessions, or rather at what reputed confessors afterward said in explanation and defense of their own admissions. Six well-esteemed women of Andover conjointly subscribed to the following account:—

“We were all seized, as prisoners, by a warrant from the justice of the peace, and forthwith carried to Salem. And, by reason of that sudden surprisal, we, knowing ourselves innocent of the crime, were all exceedingly astonished and amazed, and consternated and affrighted even out of our reason. And our nearest and dearest relations, seeing us in that dreadful condition, and knowing our great danger, apprehended there was no other way to save our lives, as the case was then circumstanced, but by our confessing ourselves to be such and such persons as the afflicted represented us to be: they” (our friends), “out of tenderness and pity, persuaded us to confess what we did confess. And indeed that confession, that it is said we made, was no other than what was suggested to us by gentlemen, they telling us that we were witches, and they knew it and we knew it, which made us think that it was so; and our understandings, our reason, our faculties almost gone, we were not capable of judging of our condition; as also the hard measures they took with us rendered us incapable of making our defense; but said anything and everything which they desired, and most of what we said was but, in effect, a consenting to what they said. Some time after, when we were better composed, they telling us what we had confessed, we did profess that we were innocent and ignorant of such things....

“Mary Osgood,Abigail Barker,
Mary Tiler,Sarah Wilson,
Deliverance Dane,Hannah Tiler.”