others, said the neighbours, they were so flexible, that the bones
appeared softened into sinews. The supposed witch was seized, and, as
she could not repeat the Lord's Prayer without making a mistake in it,
she was condemned and executed.

But the popular excitement was not allayed. One victim was not enough:
the people waited agape for new disclosures. Suddenly two hysteric
girls in another family fell into fits daily, and the cry of witchcraft
resounded from one end of the colony to the other. The feeling of
suffocation in the throat, so common in cases of hysteria, was said by
the patients to be caused by the devil himself, who had stuck balls in
the windpipe to choke them. They felt the pricking of thorns in every
part of the body, and one of them vomited needles. The case of these
girls, who were the daughter and niece of a Mr. Parris, the minister of
a Calvinist chapel, excited so much attention, that all the weak women
in the colony began to fancy themselves similarly afflicted. The more
they brooded on it, the more convinced they became. The contagion of
this mental disease was as great as if it had been a pestilence. One
after the other the women fainted away, asserting, on their recovery,
that they had seen the spectres of witches. Where there were three or
four girls in a family, they so worked, each upon the diseased
imagination of the other, that they fell into fits five or six times in
a day. Some related that the devil himself appeared to them, bearing in
his hand a parchment roll, and promising that if they would sign an
agreement transferring to him their immortal souls, they should be
immediately relieved from fits and all the ills of the flesh. Others
asserted that they saw witches only, who made them similar promises,
threatening that they should never be free from aches and pains till
they had agreed to become the devil's. When they refused, the witches
pinched, or bit, or pricked them with long pins and needles. More than
two hundred persons named by these mischievous visionaries, were thrown
into prison. They were of all ages and conditions of life, and many of
them of exemplary character. No less than nineteen were condemned and
executed before reason returned to the minds of the colonists. The most
horrible part of this lamentable history is, that among the victims
there was a little child only five years old. Some women swore that
they had seen it repeatedly in company with the devil, and that