Rosalyn Schanzer's Witches: The Salem Witch Trials
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In Rosalyn Schanzer’s Witches! The Absolutely True Tale of Disaster in Salem, in the town of Salem, there were afflicted girls who accused people of witchcraft. In early 1692, two young girls were accused of being “under an evil hand” and accused others of being witches that were causing them pain or to have fits. Hysteria was probably one of the main reasons that the trials started because some of the accusers were very harsh fits and now when researchers look back and think that the girls had a mental illness. In reality, the witch accusations were caused by parents, peers, and boredom.
Parents influenced the accusations by thinking in a mindset of revenge. This should have been abolished and not been there to start with. The parents most…show more content… So when there were chores to do (and there were always chores to do- except on Sunday, when everyone was in church), the two girl might have knit some warm socks, boiled laundry in their enormous fireplace, swept ashes off the floors, ladled out porridge for breakfast, or helped make a wild venison pie and some sweet pudding for lunch in their big iron cooking pot. When all this work was done, they could card some wool or linen, twist its fibers into yarn on a wooden spindle, mend torn britches, or even upholster a chair. Of course, they would spend some time studying the Bible and saying prayers or apple cider from large pewter cups,” (Scanzher page 19) the girls clearly would have done this out of boredom because of the fact they had basically the same routine every day and their father was a reverend who was disliked because of the way he taught the Bible and he wasn’t getting payed. Not getting payed caused him to work harder “Besides Parris, who was forever sitting beneath his map of the world to write another terrifying sermon,” (Shanzer page 20) as the book says Parris was forever sitting while writing probably caused the girls to do this for attention. They wanted to get attention from their father but he was too busy trying to improve his job and actually get paid. He was trying to be a bit more pious. In the end of the trials people wanted to abolish Parris which he refused it’s a good thing that the people didn’t charge the Parris family for their house. Also the girls could have done this because of the trials out of boredom because you could tell maybe that some other people were bored and wanted some variety in their days. For an example “A man named Ezekiel Cheevers wrote down the questions and answers