The Salem witch trials will fascinate Americans for as long as those events roil our own capacity for lunacy. In a recent Bleader post, the Reader‘s Aimee Levitt discusses the Salem trials with Stacy Schiff, author of the new book The Witches: Salem, 1692, and she tells us that Schiff believes “the legacy of Salem . . . has echoed throughout American history.”
I wrote a lot of columns back in the early 90s about parents who came to believe their children had fallen into the clutches of satanists. I interviewed Victor in the course of preparing a story about Innocence Lost: The Verdict, a Frontline report on accusations that seven adults associated with the Little Rascals day care center in Edenton, North Carolina, had raped and sodomized the children in their care. Once the details were teased out of the tots by sympathetic but relentless inquisitors (one mother denied her little girl dessert for three weeks until she came clean), prosecutors could pick and choose from an embarrassment of riches. Revelations they wisely left out of their indictment included “Mr. Bob” dressing like a clown and robbing a jewelry store, body parts strewn around the center, a child tossed into shark-infested waters and saved by a two-year-old, and Mr. Bob and Ms. Betsy killing babies in outer space.
These cases barely scrape the surface of the national madness. Reporter Debbie Nathan, formerly of the Reader, dedicated her career to standing against the tide. In 2003 I asked her to try to explain the prosecutions. “Our culture is still really atavistic,” she said, “but there’s an overlay of science on it. Mix the totally primeval stuff with science and you’ve got this mix that can’t be beat.” Prosecutors “are just as naive as anyone else, but they also know how to sway people. They have all the techniques down pat. ‘Suffer the little children.’ ‘Innocence defiled.’ ‘Worse than murder.’”
