Witches: The Absolutely True Tale of Disaster in Salem

BOOK NAME: Witches: The Absolutely True Tale of Disaster in Salem
AUTHOR: Rosalyn Schanzer

Do you have any warts or moles? If so, just be glad you didn’t live in the late 1600s in Salem, Massachusetts! Back then, these were considered to be the marks of a witch.

This book is about what happened during that time. It started when two young girls, cousins named Betty Parris and Abigail Williams, started having mysterious “fits”. Fits were when the girls would twitch and contort their bodies into strange shapes. This was very frightening to their family, and so they took the two girls to see a doctor. The diagnosis was that they were bewitched! During the fits, the girls would claim that a witch’s spirit was poking and hurting them. These stories seemed believable at that time because some respected men had written books about terrifying stories of witchcraft and the terrible things that witches do. Since almost everyone had read these stories, they were certain that witches existed.

The townspeople had never thought that a witch would threaten them, so when the news of the bewitched girls spread, there was mass hysteria. The two afflicted girls were pressured into naming who was the witch. The girls finally came up with three names and the accused women were put on trial. The accused had to pay the jail for every day they were locked up! Even if you were found innocent, you wouldn’t be released until all the fees were paid. And the hysteria didn’t stop there. In all, dozens of people were accused of witchcraft. They ranged in age from 4 to 90 years old and 19 of them were eventually hanged.

This non-fiction book gives you a lot of facts about the trials of the witches and what happened to them and their families afterward. If you love reading about history, then this is a good book for you. I would recommend this book for ages 10 and up because of the topic. I found this to be a very interesting book, so you may want to read it too.