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Spectral Evidence and the Court That Chose to Believe It
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
When Bridget Bishop hanged in June 1692, Salem's Court of Oyer and Terminer had already decided that dream testimony could send a person to the gallows — and it was about to prove it would do so again and again. This chapter examines how spectral evidence, an English legal precedent, and one determined chief judge dismantled every institutional check in the colony.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Imagine you're a judge. June, sixteen ninety-two.
To understand how ministers lost authority over magistrates, you have to understand what happened to Massachusetts in the years before sixteen ninety-two. The colony's original charter had been revoked in sixteen eighty-one.
Spectral evidence was testimony that a person's spirit, their specter, had appeared in a dream or vision and caused harm to the accuser. You couldn't cross-examine a specter.
Stoughton and the other judges weren't improvising. They had a precedent.
Nathaniel Saltonstall saw it clearly before anyone else. He was one of the nine judges on the Court of Oyer and Terminer.
August brought five more executions, and one of them broke a boundary that hadn't been crossed before. George Burroughs was a minister.
September brought the trial's most notorious single event. Giles Corey was eighty years old.
The ministers lost because authority in Massachusetts had fractured. In an earlier period, under the original charter, the relationship between religious and civil leadership was intertwined in ways that gave ministers real institutional weight.
The trials effectively ended in October sixteen ninety-two when Governor Phips dissolved the Court of Oyer and Terminer and halted further executions. The colony had jailed hundreds of people.
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