This was the post I was most excited for because Witch Trials in general are so interesting to me. Although Salem is the place where witch trials were most popular, these sort of trials were happening all throughout the country. Very recently I took a trip to Williamsburg, Virginia and they have an interactive show where they simulate what a witch trial would have looked like and they use the actual court documents to shape their show. The whole audience is jury members so anyone is free to speak and honestly, I think if I was allowed to be a part of a jury when these trials were taking place I may have sentenced innocent people to death for witch craft because it is a lot easier to convince you someone is a witch than you may think. The jury at our trial voted that the accused was in fact guilty of witch craft and they told us that is the case almost every time they do this performance. I always like to think about the ways that people would test to see if someone was a witch, like if they were able to float in water or not, because if they don't float then they probably drowned and died and if they did float then it was assumed they were a witch and they would be hung. I also think the stories of the trials were interesting because they were often just coincidences which people just felt the need to explain with witch craft. Besides all of these ways that people could "prove" someone was a witch, sometimes people would just enter the courtroom with insane testimonies such as "I saw her with the devil and then she turned into a black cat" and for some reason this was believed. Witch burnings actually were still taking place in America as recently as the 1800s. I still cannot believe that people actually believed in witch craft and all of these strange reasons that prove someone is a witch. I guess because these elements of proof were set out by leaders that everyone else just assumed them to be true and fell prey to the mass paranoia and ended up killing many innocent people because of it.
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I also am fascinated by the witch trials and I think it is pretty cool that you were able to take part in a mock one, that is super cool! I also think it is interesting that your crowd of people convicted the so called witch and It ties right into some of the things we learned in class about how easy it is to make us belive things. Great post! Very interesting!
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