The video delves into the origins and expansion of the witch hunt phenomena, focusing on the infamous witch trials that predates the Salem witch trials by over a hundred years, gripping Europe, leading to the deaths of nearly 60,000 individuals accused of witchcraft. The discussion highlights how societies, burdened by religious wars, plagues, and lacking scientific knowledge, resorted to attributing natural calamities and personal misfortunes to witchcraft, thereby igniting widespread hysteria and witch trials across the Western world.
The video provides an in-depth examination of Heinrich Kramer, a Dominican monk whose obsessive crusade against perceived witches, fueled by personal failures and religious fervor, led to the publication of "Malleus Maleficarum" — a guide that laid the foundation for witch hunts for decades. The narrative illustrates the role of influential figures like Dietrich Flada who, after leading numerous trials, themselves fell victim to the witch hunt frenzy, showcasing the societal paranoia and the political, social, and personal conflicts that fueled the trials.
Main takeaways from the video:
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Key Vocabularies and Common Phrases:
1. notorious [noʊˈtɔːriəs] - (adjective) - Famous or well known, typically for some bad quality or deed. - Synonyms: (infamous, disreputable, scandalous)
The Salem witch trials remain the most notorious in history.
2. heresy [ˈhɛrəsi] - (noun) - Belief or opinion contrary to orthodox religious doctrine. - Synonyms: (dissension, nonconformity, apostasy)
Fear of heresy.
3. scapegoat [ˈskeɪpˌɡoʊt] - (noun) - A person or group made to bear the blame for others. - Synonyms: (fall guy, whipping boy, victim)
The witch is an ideal scapegoat for a lot of these different challenges that people face.
4. theocracy [θiˈɑːkrəsi] - (noun) - A system of government in which priests rule in the name of God or a god. - Synonyms: (church state, ecclesiocracy)
We're really dealing with nations which are theocracies.
5. persecution [ˌpɜːrsɪˈkjuːʃən] - (noun) - Hostility and ill-treatment, especially because of race or political or religious beliefs. - Synonyms: (oppression, maltreatment, discrimination)
Intense religious tension, warfare, persecution, bad weather.
6. demonology [ˌdiːməˈnɒlədʒi] - (noun) - The study of demons or beliefs about demons, especially the methods used to summon and control them. - Synonyms: (occultism, witchcraft studies)
Lots of people started writing demonologies.
7. maverick [ˈmævərɪk] - (noun / adjective) - An unorthodox or independent-minded person. - Synonyms: (nonconformist, individualist, rebel)
Kramer seems to have been a maverick.
8. fiasco [fiˈæskoʊ] - (noun) - A complete and ignominious failure. - Synonyms: (catastrophe, debacle, disaster)
Finally the trial ended as a total fiasco.
9. fanatic [fəˈnætɪk] - (noun / adjective) - A person filled with excessive and single-minded zeal, especially for an extreme religious or political cause. - Synonyms: (zealot, extremist, radical)
Ruled by Johann von Schoenenberg, who is a Counter Reformation Roman Catholic fanatic.
10. denunciation [dɪˌnʌnsiˈeɪʃən] - (noun) - Public condemnation of someone or something. - Synonyms: (accusation, condemnation, censure)
And it's their denunciations that help speed up the trial processes
The Witch Hunts Begin (Full Episode) - Witches - Truth Behind the Trials
The Salem witch trials remain the most notorious in history. But more than a century before New England tore itself apart, a panic gripped the Western world, and the era of the witch hunt began. People believe in God, but that means they believe in the devil, too. They're on the lookout for witchcraft. Over two centuries, nearly 60,000 people, mostly women, were put to death for the crime of witchcraft in a series of hunts and trials that spread across Europe and the Americas.
And suddenly you're on trial for your life. That's a terrifying thing. Neighbor turned against neighbor in a desperate attempt to root out malevolent witches. Those found guilty were hanged, beheaded, or burnt. We cannot underestimate what impression this must have left on people seeing a person being burned to death. These are the true stories of the people pursued and executed as witches and the men who made it their mission to hunt them down.
The idea of a witch is prehistoric. It's there right at the beginning of recorded human time. In ancient times, a witch was somebody who did harm in a community by magical means. They might do it through all sorts of different routes, do with herbs or stones or anything that you might find in the natural environment, but you wouldn't necessarily put them on trial. You might think that who you thought was a witch was also an asset to your community because they could also do good magic, they could heal people, they could change the weather.
Magic could be good and bad. And it was a very flexible force in the ancient world. As the 13th and 14th centuries pass, perceptions shift and the world becomes dangerous for anyone identified as a witch. The Middle Ages isn't an easy time to be alive. There is widespread war across Europe, much of which is religious war between Catholics, Protestants, and other emerging sects. There are also a whole range of other dangers, wide scale epidemics, particularly of the bubonic plague, which kills people in very large numbers indeed.
People are so desperate for advice and help, where sickness is scarily common in comparison with the modern world, in which your children and your elderly relatives are both very likely prey to infectious diseases, the origins of which you don't understand at all. The witch is an ideal scapegoat for a lot of these different challenges that people face. And so the belief in witchcraft was just offering an explanation. And not only an explanation, it was also offering suspects and people who were thought to be guilty of it. So you could give these catastrophes a face. You could say, this woman or this man is doing it.
The surge to accuse is driven by ordinary people who really do believe that the suspects have ruined their lives, killed their children and livestock set their houses on fire, destroyed their crops. And people with no knowledge of meteorology, no knowledge of biology, no knowledge of pathology, no way of explaining disease, no way of explaining bad weather. Witchcraft becomes a rational explanation for all sorts of things.
The end of the 15th century, you start to get a sense of witchcraft in European society, growing out of the fear of heresy. A heretic is someone who is defined by the church authorities as not following the rules, the regulations, the beliefs of Christian orthodoxy. Because in this period of the 15th to 18th centuries, we're really dealing with nations which are theocracies, they're really godly states.
People aren't comfortable embracing these different divergent views. There can only be one right one. The Church decides that witches and heretics are very much like each other. All of the things that people have been thinking about before, magic of various good kinds, medicinal magic, manipulating the weather, get swept up into this new definition of what a witch is. The witch becomes somebody who not only does harm in your community, but does it by the help of the devil. They might agree a pact with the devil. To do that, they would be given power in exchange for handing over their body and soul to the devil, in exchange for worshiping the devil.
And it became more and more likely too, that witches would be women. Underlying the concept of witch in all countries was the idea that women were the weaker vessels. The Bible taught women might be more susceptible to the devil's temptation. So I think that's always hardwired into every witchcraft accusation. And that's why one finds that 80% of accused witches are women. The Catholic Church decides that actually there really are witches, and it's the church's job to root them out.
When you get a combination of intense religious tension, warfare, persecution, bad weather, and a new idea of a Satanic crusade using witches, that's the perfect storm you're looking for to create intense witch hunts. During the mid 15th century, there were sporadic witch trials and lots of people started writing demonologies. A demonologist is an expert in the way that demons work. After 1400 in Europe, increasingly, if you're a demonologist, you're out to explain how witches work as well.
The particularly important demonologist was Heinrich Kramer. He was a Dominican monk looking for witches. Kramer seems to have been a maverick. He had a very bad reputation for being a trunk. His fight against the witches really begins as a one man crusade. He goes to Rome and receives an official writ by the Pope that declares Kramer to be responsible for eradicating witches in southern Germany.
Kramer conducts a witch trial in Innsbruck in Austria in 1485. He encouraged people to denounce others. To him, persons were regarded as witches. And he gets the names of seven women brought to him. In particular, the leading one of these women is the one called Helena Scheuberin, and he's particularly interested in Helena. So he decides to hold a witch trial and Helena will be the first accused to be brought into court.
Some of the officials are the local bishops actually stand up and intervene in the trial. And it becomes apparent that while Crmer thinks he is absolutely in the right and he has the Pope's authority, the local clergy really don't share that opinion. They are not sure about his witchcraft accusations. And finally the trial ended as a total fiasco. He thought he had the power of the Pope, but it's turned out that at the first test, local clergy don't believe him. He had to leave Innsbruck very hastily. He had lost his entire reputation. He had made been the laughingstock, essentially.
And he comes across as a very creepy, very strange, very obsessive individual. The people who throw him out of Innsbruck go as far as to say they think he is demented, they think he is mad. Kramer was obsessed with the idea that women are weak, weak in every respect. Their bodies are weak, their minds are weak, and their souls are weak.
He's so upset about this failure that he sits down and writes a book called Malleus Maleficarum, the Hammer of Witches. This sets forth his demonological ideas. It is the one stop shop for all witch hunters for the next couple of decades. Everything you need to know about witches and witch hunts is in this book.
Malleus Maleficarum means, when we translate it literally, the Hammer of the female evildoers. We sin because we are weak, and we do not understand that the devil tries to seduce them, the devil deceives them. He says witchcraft isn't just harmful magic, because that idea has been around for centuries. What Cramer is saying is witchcraft is now a heretical act of making pacts with the devil. So he's really shifting the emphasis for elite, educated men about what witchcraft was.
Cromer's experience of an unsuccessful trial in Innsbruck mean that he says in Malus Maleficarum that there's no need for what he calls the screeching and posturing of lawyers. He thinks lawyers are obsessed with small details, things like whether their client is guilty or not. What's required, he says, and he says it quite flatly and bluntly and openly, is that witchcraft suspects should be tortured as soon as possible they can be tortured very lightly.
He says, for example, you might just hang them up a little bit by their arms and you might just break their joints a little bit and just put them to a little bit of terrible pain. And he thinks this is absolutely reasonable. When you look at it now, this is a recipe for people to confess to things they haven't done and to be executed as witches, when in fact they're nothing of the sort.
Malus Maleficarum is particularly popular across the German speaking lands of what is now Germany and what is now Austria and Switzerland. And he's very pleased to report in Malleus Maleficarum that other inquisitors are taking up the demological work too. He reports that many of them have had tens of people executed in those jurisdictions and he sees this as a big success with which is now a serious threat to the Christian world.
Panic sweeps into the German lands where one of the first whatever mass witch trial begins. Hundreds of innocent people will be executed. As the hunts spiral out of control. No one is safe from the merciless and vengeful witch finders.
Germany is a real hotspot of religious conflict in the 1560s, 16th and 17th centuries. And I think that makes German people think more about the role that they think the devil is playing in their worlds. The sort of temptations to believe in the wrong kind of religion, temptations to sin, the role of women within religious communities. And I think that makes them particularly prone, I think, to want to hold witch trials.
Modern day Germany doesn't exist. There's a much, much bigger political entity in central Europe that's called the Holy Roman Empire. It's very, very, very fragmented politically. And what that means is that political and very importantly, legal authority is really devolved to regional or territorial rulers.
Trier is an independent state ruled by Johann von Schoenenberg, who is a Counter Reformation Roman Catholic fanatic. In other words, he's no ordinary archbishop. He's somebody who's had his consciousness raised to believe that Satan is out to destroy the one true Catholic Church, using witches as Satan's instruments. He's out to make sure that Trier is kept clear of the lot.
Trier is in an exceptionally bad way. In the 1580s, hailstorms and frosts hit the territory in what's supposed to be the summers and early autumns. These communities genuinely think that witches in league with the devil, in league with each other, are damaging their crops, ruining their livelihoods, causing them and their families to fall ill. If you believe in witchcraft, you are likely to think that the witch might be responsible for your negative experience.
When you begin to look around who could be a witch trier? And some of the areas around it are rather unusual in that justice is often in the hands of self appointed committees with a special remit to find and try witches. What are called Hexenautschusse in German and it translates as witch committees. The idea of Frankenstein style villagers running around with flaming torches and pitchforks is completely wrong. The idea of empanelled amateurs who are out for blood is far closer.
They are really village committees that are here for just one purpose, to identify witches. And that's precisely what we do. If you find a person you think is likely to have a pact with the devil, you would inform the witch hunting committee where would begin to collect evidence, to hear witnesses. You would pay a clerk and you would submit that to the official of the prince, arrest this person and bring him or her to court.
Witch hunting committees continue to spring up in villages across the region, each with an insatiable amp to eradicate the ever growing number of witches they believe are harming their communities. The village witch hunting committees of the Trier countryside have no power over the city and therefore they have no political impact.
What they have is an emotional impact. They get the citizens of Trier thinking about witches. There are lots of rumors in the city of Trier that alleged witches had fled into the city to avoid getting arrested as witches. There is a great wave going on. More and more people have been arrested and some prisons are filled up with suspected so called witches.
The trials spread from village to village, creating a wave of terror so powerful it soon engulfs the city of Trier. And here no one is safe, not even the wealthiest members of the elite. Witchcraft is seen as such a threat that they decide to treat witchcraft as what was called an exceptional crime. An accepted crime can be treated in a very short procedure a week from the arrest to the execution.
In many cases we wouldn't even hear witnesses, just interrogate the accused. With most crimes you prove through witnesses and physical means that somebody has committed it. But because magic is supposed to be invisible, you cannot actually employ those rules. That's when the really abusive treatment of suspects comes in. Simply to force people to confess. They're doing what Heinrich Kramer wanted them to do, which is to say witchcraft is so bad, it's so terrifying we will just ignore the rules.
Even for the strange and magical crime of witchcraft. Trials take place in an established court overseen by an all powerful judge. Presiding over the witch trials in Trier is the wealthy, ruthless and unforgiving Dietrich Flada. Dietrich Flada is probably the most important citizen of the city of Trier in the early 1580s.
He's been building his career there for decades. He served as various city officials. He is very much the Prince elector's hitman. He takes on the city on behalf of the archbishop and he beats it down to increase the archbishop's power over the city. He was also a money lender to the city, but also to the peasants in the rural area and to citizens in Trier. He didn't treat the people who owed him money very well. Vlado was, for a time, the main judge at the city of in this function.
He absolutely believed in the concept of witchcraft himself. He was present at the questioning, at the torture. He looked for better measures to bring witches to confession. The judges were, at least in Germany, mostly later. Most of them had never been to university. Most of them had never studied law. Flada was an exception. He had studied law. He had a doctorate. So Flada could have been more critical of the witch trials.
So few trial records survived. The remaining records tell us that a number of trials happened in the villages, but we know fairly little about them. Among the victims of the witch hunts at Trier was Margaretha Braun. She was a poor washing woman. She was called a witch in public, on the marketplace for everybody to hear. If you do that, you are very, very certain that the person that you call a witch cannot defend herself. After she was arrested, she was tortured seven times, very, very harshly. But they could not gain any confession out of her. And this is when Flade steps in to put more pressure on her.
Torture is often used as a tool of terror. It becomes extremely effective because what you're doing is you're instilling terror in the entire community and the entire families in villages in wider society. And by doing that, you create this sense of, I have to tell on others. Also, when there are grudges against people, that they will create stories or create evidence that actually implicates people, even when they haven't actually done anything. But the purpose is to instill fear.
Flada subjects Margarita Braun to merciless rounds of brutal and intense torture. She searches for a confession to end the agony. She admits to committing a venial sin, which is eating meat in a broth, which is all she can afford on a fast day. Of course, it's not directly connected to witchcraft. There's nothing magical about that brothel. It is about the witches being bad persons. They might break the fast by eating a meat based type of food on a fast day.
Margarethe Brown is the first case where we do have trial records, but only fragments, so we do not know if she was executed, but I think she was because Flade tried very hard to bring her to confession. Accusations and trials continue to spread ferociously across Trier. Hundreds are interrogated, confessions grow wilder and a terrifying conspiracy emerges.
Unfortunately, in many cases in Germany, it's assumed that witches can't do the damage they do without there being a whole bunch of them. And so it's quite regular for people under torture once they've confessed to being a devil worshipping witch themselves, to name other people with whom they traveled to the witch's Sabbath. They believe that witches are gathering in large numbers. They have to try and explain how witches could get to these Sabbaths in large numbers at night, because they happen at night.
So that's where the belief in magical flying comes in. So they're flying to the Sabbaths, they're worshiping the devil, not God. They're kissing the devil on the backside. Importantly, they're plotting their acts of harm against the communities around them. Sacrificing children, eating babies, the seduction by the devil, the sexual intercourse with the devil, the evil deeds they did at the witcher Sabbath.
This is all of your worst fantasy nightmare of what heresy, a witch as heresy might be, because it suggests there's a big group of witches out there. And what that encourages the courts to do is they say, who else did you see at the witches Sabbath? If you're torturing someone and asking them those sorts of leading questions, what happens is that the suspects begin denouncing other people.
Increasingly, accused witches are claiming to have seen prominent members of the city council at witches Sabbaths. They rely on children's testimony. And the idea is that these boys have been taken to the witch's Sabbath and they're used as a way into this hidden world. And it's their denunciations that help speed up the trial processes.
A 16 year old boy from the countryside near Trier who's been giving witness against accused witches mentions that he was taken along to the witches Sabbath and he saw Flada there. The accusation that a powerful member of the elite like Dietrich Fleda has taken part in the witches Sabbath sends shockwaves through the city. Other witnesses emerge, each telling a story of Flatter's diabolical deeds. A picture is forming.
The annunciations against Flade accelerated, which is said that Flade was the master of the Sabbath. More and more named him personally and said it was Dietrich Flaade. He was there, he came there in a golden carriage drawn by black horses. They say that he is profiting from the weather magic. In other words, the bad weather that the witches are causing is making the harvest fail.
And that works to the advantage of FL and other men like him. They've got stocks and stores of grain. They're believed to be selling those stores of grain for a high profit. FL was one of the most outspoken supporters of the Prince Archbishop. The Prince Archbishop looked the other way. The Prince Archbishop didn't allow a witch trial against FL to begin.
In 1588, a commission is established to look for circumstantial evidence and to look for all these denunciations made against. FL is well aware that something is going on. He knows perfectly well that after a certain amount of denunciation, it will get difficult for him to avoid the trial. Crowds in the street are crying out for his blood or his cinders. He is already convicted in the court of public opinion.
The key accusation against Flada, which makes his all powerful master, the Prince Elector, abandon him, is that Flada, on doing his deal with the devil, agreed to try and murder his master. Vlada's unlucky in that the health of the Prince Elector actually has been bad lately. And so it's quite easy to persuade a man who is ill and can't really work out why, and over whom the medics are scratching their head, that the solution to his problems is that an attempt he is being made to kill him through a mysterious and lingering malady of bewitchment. And in the end, he comes to believe it.
Flada's downfall goes through various stages. He attempts to run. He actually gets out of the city. But the guy who's transported him realizes that he's taking a wanted criminal away and pinions him and takes him back again and hands him over. After that, he's put under house arrest. He makes one more escape attempt. Finally, Prince Elect gives way and allows Flada to be put on trial.
And the moment that happens, he's doomed. Floda understood which trials. He had been a judge himself. He knew that there was very little he could do. He knew that the court would torture him and that he would eventually confess. He would have been psychologically in quite a hopeless position, quite a hopeless frame of mind. He would probably have been stripped, manhandled, he'd probably probed and pricked.
So the physical impact of that humiliation, for a man of his standing and a man of his wealth, would have been pretty, pretty devastating. That's even before you get to the actual physical torture. The Standard German and Swiss instrument of torture at this period is the strappado. You have your hands tied behind your back. A rope is tied around your wrist. And then you throw the rope through a hook in the ceiling and simply pull on the other end.
Of course, it's intended to create maximum pain, but what it also does is it causes physical injuries, so it can create tears in the ligaments and tendons. You may be beaten in that position. You may have fractures, you may have broken bones. You may be beaten on your head at the same time. Again, that can lead to head injuries. People can also start to hallucinate with intense pain. And under those conditions, you're left in that state. And there's a sense of creating humiliation and shame. You can lose a sense of where you are. You literally lose your sense of self.
And that's the purpose of torture, right? Because then you're malleable. You can be told what to say. You can be forced. It creates this internal conflict for those that are being tortured is to do I surrender to the demands of the torturer, even if it means I'm lying and I know it's not the truth? Or do I hold on to my sense of truth and know that I will be killed anyway?
Months of torture exact a brutal toll. Fly breaks the interrogators have forced a confession. Flessed to being a witch. He had met the devil. He had had intercourse with the devil. He made pact. The devil gave him the ability to use magic to his own advantage.
He admitted to having planned to kill people, to make people ill. He had gone to the Sabbath. He accepted his role as the master of witches. With every word, he sealed his fate. But he knew already, I suppose, when he faced his judge, that it was over, that there was no way out of this anymore. Vlada awaits his verdict.
His fate is sealed. He is found guilty of witchcraft and sentenced to death. People convicted of witchcraft are regarded as heretics as well as criminals. And it was believed that the bodies of heretics were actually unclean, that they could blight a community with ill fortune. Alive or dead, their corpses needed to be burned to remove the contagion from the community.
Most people sentenced to burn for witchcraft were dispatched by a much more humane means. Beforehand, the two usual choices were strangling them or beheading them. And both of those are relatively merciful, relatively quick ways to go.
Flade perhaps thought until the last minute that this ordeal would not happen to him, that he perhaps could get out of it, that he was spared the fire. But he was not justice has to be public. This is what the people of the early modern period expect. Numerous people came to witness his execution. I mean, he was a celebrity. This was a very prominent case.
We need to remember as well that he would have looked so different from before. You know, he would have been a rich man before, a beautifully dressed man, a wealthy man. You know, he's in prison for weeks, he's tortured. He would have looked almost unrecognizable probably by the time of his execution because of the treatment that he's. He's undergone. He made a last speech, very pious one, and that he was righteously treated and that the people should take an example by his fate.
The only thing he has left is to die a good death. That was believed to be very important at the time that you go to meet your maker in a sort of penitent and kind of dignified away. The idea was that if you've confessed, that would stand you in good stead with God when you go into the next life. Crowds gathered to watch the once powerful judge meet his terrible fate.
Florida's execution does send a message that nobody is really abse. Absolutely safe from accusation. If you can accuse Florida, an affluent man from the city, of witchcraft, you can accuse everybody of witchcraft. It becomes possible to take out other city leaders. They tend to be former city officials who've lost power and are now vulnerable to their rivals. Trier becomes the example for witch hunts done right.
Witch hunts who do not respect social status anymore. Everybody could be a witch Dietrich. Vlada may be dead, but the hunt rages on. What started as a crusade against evil and suspicious women in the villages surrounding Trier has now ensnared powerful members of the city's elite.
In the electorate of trier, probably between 800 and 1,000 people are executed for witchcraft. The wave of witch hunt's fluted for another 10 years. Roughly after his death. The Prince Elector Johann von Schoenenberg has become genuinely concerned about the fact that the witch trials have gone on for so long. The fact that the witch trials have begun to incorporate, you know, men and members of the social and political elite.
In 1591 he issues his ordinance concerning witch hunting committees. This ordinance is an attempt to rein in the activities of the committees. The ordinance has never tried to end the activities just like that. The point was merely to bring them under the control of the representatives of the government. However, this ordinance had not such a great success because which planting committees could still be established.
They were still working together, so its success was rather low. The Fears about witchcraft were kept going. The knowledge about who was a witch, who might be a witch, was kept going, but it was also spread. You know, these are very public events, the executions. So it's actually quite hard in one of these smallish territories to say no to your subjects when they. When they actually want to keep hunting witches.
By the mid-1590s, there are signs that people think it's time to wind witch hunting down. Economic conditions improve somewhat. Some of those real pressures, those really intense pressures on the economy, they. They die down to some extent. But belief is absolutely still there. It's not that people stop believing Trier was an influence on all later witch ones simply because it was so well known.
So what do we know about witches? We know what we have learned during the witch trials from the confessions of the witches, and we get that type of information in demonological books that refer to Trier. Trier's witch hunt is big European news, and that's because this is the age of the printing press and it generates a lot of print.
Pamphlets were printed. Some of these pamphlets were also translated in Dutch language, in English language, in Danish language. The Trier Hexen Tansplatz is a very, very detailed image from 1593, which shows this supposed witch's Sabbath in absolute immense detail. So we've got everything from the King of the Sabbath sitting at a table feasting.
You've got Florida supposed golden coach approaching. You've got witch clerics doing magic, you've got witches flying. It's incredibly detailed. This is the best means of spreading witch hunting among ordinary people. You only need to have one literate person in a community who can read out the text of the pub to get everybody in the community up to speed on how to have a witch hunt.
The great German opponent of the witch hunts, Friedrich Spee, called Germany the mother of the witches. And he was right. About half of all the people executed for witchcraft worldwide during the early modern period came from Germany. It was the first Catholic witch hunt gaining such a popularity and such a media hype.
These witch trials were recognized all over the Holy Roman Empire, but also in other parts of Europe. Dreea had proven that the witches were really about to take over, that they could really threaten the entire society. In just over a decade, hundreds of people have been accused of witchcraft and executed. Although the panic in Trier fades, it marks the beginning of the witch hunts. Europe and North America will soon be consumed by the bloodthirsty drive to kill witches. Trier may have been the first mass witch trial, but it won't be the last.
HISTORY, WITCH TRIALS, TRIER WITCH TRIALS, SALEM WITCH TRIALS, PERSECUTION, LEGACY, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC