Rebecca's Rising

It is seemingly impossible to imagine what seventy-one-year-old Rebecca Nurse endured during the summer of 1692 when she was accused of witchcraft in the early Massachusetts Colony of Salem Village. Rebecca was a respected and God-fearing member of her community. Yet, life was not easy for her and her neighbors in Salem Village during 1692. Rebecca, alongside her large family of nine children, struggled to survive and endure smallpox outbreaks, food shortages, native people attacks and very harsh winters. Today, visitors to Salem are able to explore landmarks such as The House of Seven Gables and gain an understanding of what it was like for families to huddle and sleep on a wooden kitchen or dining room table in winter just to be heated by the fireplace, which also served as a stove. In addition to the harshness of pre-American times, Salem was a place where paranoia and, at times, hysteria could easily take over a person’s wellbeing and sanity. The Puritans feared evil and the so-called devil magic, which they saw as a threat to God and his superiority in their often-barren existence. Most of these individuals attended church regularly and prayed throughout the day and night in hopes of warding off the devil, who yearned to sneak into their very physical and spiritual beings. In Rebecca’s time, witchcraft was both a sin and crime, for a witch could summon the devil to t*****e and harm others. It is hard to believe Rebecca, who had given birth to nine children and had lived as a Christian, was accused of witchcraft at seventy-one years old. History reveals that when accused of harboring evil powers, Rebecca was quoted as saying, “What sin has God found in me unrepentant of that He should lay such an affliction on me in my old age.” By the end of May 1692, nearly 200 people (a large number of the early village residents) had been accused and jailed under the charges of witchcraft. Ultimately, about half of those individuals were found guilty during the trials, and twenty of them were tortured before being executed, mostly by hanging. On July 19, 1692, Rebecca was hanged as one of the victims of the witch trials. It was recorded that she maintained her dignity and innocence to the very end. In jail, the accused witches were treated harshly by their captors. To assure they were destroying the devil and driving evil from their midst, the paranoid accusers often burned, destroyed, or buried the remains of the executed in shallow graves at the execution site. The majority of those convicted, yet found not guilty, remained in jail because they lacked the financial resources to pay to be released, as was required by law in 1692. As a matter of fact, the law stipulated that prisoners had to pay for their food and board before being released. Over the centuries, it has been said that Rebecca’s family secretly returned to the execution site and recovered her body to properly bury her at their homestead in what is now Danvers and was part of Salem Village in 1692. Rebecca’s actual homestead still stands today and is open to the public as the only remaining home of the accused Salem witches. Rebecca was an ancestor of mine, and as a child my late grandfather would often take me to Salem from our nearby home and teach me the fascinating and entertaining history of Salem. My bloodline goes from the Heath’s to the Putnam’s to the Newhall’s to the Tarbell’s and to Rebecca Nurse (or Nourse). It is interesting to note that Rebecca was accused by Ann Putnam who claimed that Rebecca’s specter would enter her room at night and t*****e her. I was always impressed by her courage, strength, faith and dignity at a time when pure hysteria ruled the day and Salem witch trials. I often wonder how far we have come in society from some 330 years ago when a person’s mere accusation with zero proof could result in being arrested, placed in irons, jailed, tortured and hanged. It seems as though the same kind of paranoia and hysteria is still present today. As someone who grew up in the Salem area, I was always aware that the region’s rich history was a double-edge sword. Even as the witch trials attempted to fade into history, the horror that once was could not evaporate. Salem did enjoy centuries of amazing early American maritime history, most of which is now on display at the Peabody Essex Museum. However, there continues to be a real hypocrisy in Salem being home to the witch trials. Today, the Salem witch trials stand as one of the world’s largest organized and sustained legal hunts for witches in history. Despite nonfiction accounts of the trials, we will never know the true reasons for what occurred. Was it simply the wild imaginations of teenage girls who ingested Rye ergot and told their elders that someone in the village was making them sick or giving them body aches through evil transmissions or witchcraft spells? Or was it all over property disputes as a big land grab by the powerful? Although we will never know for sure, we do know that numerous innocent people suffered in hell-hole jails or had their necks snapped near Gallows Hill. As a result, Salem continues to draw hundreds of thousands of witchcraft fans every fall to celebrate Halloween unlike anywhere else. While it has taken more than 300 years to truly pay respect and sorrow to the families of the accused witches, Salem has created a booming and lucrative tourism industry out of witchcraft and all things witches. I don’t seek out pity, but I do call out hypocrisy when I see it, and I saw it growing up and when I first wrote these books Salem VI- Rebecca’s Rising and Chain of Souls. In modern times, the city of Salem deployed the witch on a broomstick just about everywhere to help capture the title of top witch city on earth. As a kid growing up in the area, I remember playing the Salem High School Witches in sports, and the Dairy Queen sign had a witch flying on it, as did the door of the Salem police cruisers. Yet, despite the extensive marketing exploitation of the Salem witch trials, little was done for more than 300 years to actually discover the location where the accused were hanged or where their remains might be. We have long known that these individuals were hanged in Gallows Hill Park. However, there wasn’t even a memorial with the victims’ names or any indication that this was the location of their execution and hanging until a few years ago. A group recently discovered the actual site of the hangings, Proctor’s Ledge below Gallows Hill. Prior to this finding, there was only a Walgreens d**g store and a small park, with no trace of the history that took place prior. Rebecca was seventy-one when she was hanged there. She was fully exonerated some twenty years after her death. The exact site of her remains is still a mystery. I have always believed that her spirit lived on, as John Anders will discover in my books, which you are about to read. I hope you enjoy them as much as I did creating and writing them. Maybe, just maybe, Rebecca is Rising and prepared for some spiritual vengeance. Enjoy. JH