was a serious matter, one of life or death,
and often it was safer to become an accuser than one of the accused.
Made in terror, malice, mischief, revenge, or religious dementia, or of
some other ingredients in the Devil's brew, it passed through the
stages of suspicion, espionage, watchings, and searchings, to the formal
complaints and indictments which followed the testimony of the
witnesses, in their madness and delusion hot-foot to tell the story of
their undoing, their grotesque imaginings, their spectral visions, their
sufferings at the hands of Satan and his tools, and all aimed at people,
their neighbors and acquaintances, often wholly innocent, but having
marked personal peculiarities, or of irregular lives by the Puritan
standard, or unpopular in their communities, who were made the victim of
one base passion or another and brought to trial for a capital offense
against person and property.

Taking into account the actual number of accusations, trials, and
convictions or acquittals, the number of witnesses called and
depositions given was very great. And the later generations owe their
opportunity to judge aright in the matter, to the foresight of the men
of chief note in the communities who saw the vital necessity of record
evidence, and so early as 1666, in the General Court of Connecticut, it
was ordered that

"Whatever testimonies are improved in any court of justice in this
corporation in any action or case to be tried, shall be presented in
writing, and so kept by the secretary or clerk of the said court on
file."

This preliminary analysis brings the searcher for the truth face to face
with the very witnesses who have left behind them, in the attested
records, the ludicrous or solemn, the pitiable or laughable memorials of
their own folly, delusion, or deviltry, which marked them then and now
as Satan's chosen servitors.

Among the many witnesses and their statements on oath now made
available, the chief difficulty is one of selection and elimination; and
there will be presented here with the context some of the chief
depositions[F] and statements in the most notable witchcraft trials in
some of the Connecticut towns, that are typical of all of them, and show
upon what travesties of evidence the juries found their verdicts and the
courts imposed their sentences.

[Footnote F: The selected testimonies herein given are from the
Connecticut and New Haven colonial records; from the original
deposi