11. History’s Most Notorious Bout of Mass Panic
The Salem Witch Panic of 1692 – 1693 took place against a cultural and religious background that was predisposed to believe in the supernatural. Witchcraft is laughable to most today, but in seventeenth-century Colonial America, and especially in Salem and the Massachusetts Bay Colony, it was taken quite seriously. The belief that the Devil could grant witches extraordinary powers in return for their loyalty, and that witchcraft could be used to inflict harm on the good and godly, was taken for granted.
What is probably history’s most famous, or infamous, bout of collective hysteria began in January 1692, when the nine-year-old-year-old daughter and eleven-year-old niece of Salem’s reverend started having screaming fits. During those bouts, they contorted themselves into unnatural positions, threw things, and made weird noises. A local doctor examined the children but found no signs of a physical ailment to explain the behavior. So he blamed it on the supernatural. Soon, another young girl, aged eleven, started exhibiting similar symptoms.
