Escaping the Salem Witch Trials

Bribe the jailer.
Get a relative to bonk said jailer a hefty one on the bonce. The leg it.
Threaten to put a hex/curse on jailer. He is in a nervous flux and lets prisoners go.
Pick the locks.
Rename Salem Village the Great Escape...
how many people escaped?

History_gal said:

around 9 out of 156 that were listed in the book I was reading, but there are alot of blanks (it doesnt say if they were convicted, executed, escaped...) so there might have been more that escaped, but it wasn't documented.

Do you know if people did bribe the jailer, or bash him on the head and flee?

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Considering the number of convictions in a short period, I would think the "jail" was overcrowded. In a small, relatively crime-free place like Salem, Mass, I would think there wouldn't be much jail space. Perhaps these people were simply able to slip away. There may not have been enough jailers to go around, and the accused may have been put in places that weren't very secure.

You might want to see what information you can find about where they were all placed and how many jailors they had to guard them. I could be wrong about this.

History_gal said:

around 9 out of 156 that were listed in the book I was reading, but there are alot of blanks (it doesnt say if they were convicted, executed, escaped...) so there might have been more that escaped, but it wasn't documented.

Do you know if people did bribe the jailer, or bash him on the head and flee?

Click to expand...

Hmmm if I remember my studies correctly they were not all imprisoned in one place - I think some were sent to Boston. Some died in prison - is that a form of escape?

I honestly don't know if jailers were bribed - but if the prisons over there were the same as over here then prisoners had to pay for better food and nicer cells. So bribery was possible. I would hazard a guess that some of the prisoners were so stunned by their predicament that they lost the ability to think rationally.

Have you read Mist Over Pendle by Robert Neil? It is based on the true story of the Pendle Witches in Lancashire, UK in 1612. See here: http://www.pendlewitches.co.uk/

The Heretic's Daughter by Kathleen Kent is based on the life of her several times great grandmother. Said grandmother was arrested as a witch, tried, and IIRC correctly executed. It is a novel, not non-fiction, but seemed to be pretty well researched. It gave quite a lot of detail of her time in the prison and the conditions there. She was not in Salem, but somewhere not too far away.

MM

She might have been one of the Connecticut witches who predated Salem by a good 40-50 years. My eleven-times GGrandmother, Mary Barnes, was one of those. 'The Devil in the Shape of a Woman' is a good book for researching the culture and the times. 'Escaping Salem', about the Stamford, Connecticut, witch trials of the same year as the Salem trials, is good, too.

This article about Philip English, sites 'lenient supervision' for his escape.

Wikipedia lists the accused and their fate - some of those listed as 'escaped' have links to their stories. You might be able to find more by googling each individual. Good luck! I've always been fascinated by witchcraft and those who died for it, even before discovering my relationship to Mary. She was the last woman hanged for it in Connecticut in 1662, IIRC.

When looking at an online pedigree chart for one of my ancestors, I recently discovered that I'm descended from two of the women executed in Salem in 1692--Rebecca Towne Nurse (who was 71 and a highly respected member of the community, unlike most of the other people accused) and Martha Allen Carrier (who was about 33 and widely disliked). According to this pedigree, my fifth great-grandmother was descended from both of these women. I haven't verified the connections through other sources yet, but it's renewed my interest in the Salem Witch Trials. I hope to eventually be able to say for certain that I'm one of their descendants.

Not Salem, but in Germany, one of my great (however many) grandmothers was convicted as a witch and "escaped" by surviving the water torture. Could that be the way in which they mean escape? Puma

Puma,

How did they "escape" the water torture? I am unschooled on this period, but I have a terrible recollection that goes like this:

To test whether a person is a witch you throw them into a deep water.

1. If they float, they are a witch and must be executed.

2. If they sink and drown, they are not a witch, but are still dead.

Where is the "escape"? This is fascinating, and I am interested to see how one might overcome the contradiction. Good stories abound in this area, maybe I will have to write one.

Martha Carrier is the subject of The Heretic's Daughter.

MM

Flood, from what's written in the German church records, when they pulled her up, she revived. This was during the dead of winter. There have been modern accounts of drownings in cold weather where the victim has been revived and survived - the cold apparently shuts down the system before complete drowning occurs. That's my suspicion of what happened.

Quite a while ago I posted a short story about the incident in historical SYW called Agnes. Puma