New England's

Professional custom term papers are original, composed by qualified writers, and emailed on time. In 1692, according to Cotton Mather, some of New England's youth were "led away with little sorceries." Two of these children lived in the household of the Reverend Samuel Parris. His nine-year-old daughter Elizabeth and eleven-year-old niece Abigail Williams began to dabble with the occult in the cold days of January. In the darkness of the poorly lit two-story Salem Village parsonage, the two girls apparently sought to divine what their husbands would be like. A neighboring clergyman understood that they employed "an egg and a glass," like a crystal ball, "in a vain curiosity to know their future condition," an act he condemned because they had "tampered with the Devil's tools." Whatever Elizabeth and Abigail thought they had learned, their experiments frightened them, and they began to act in peculiar and disturbing ways. John Hale, a minister from nearby Beverly, described their "distempers":

These children were bitten and pinched by invisible agents. Their arms, necks, and backs turned this way and that way, and returned back again, so as it was impossible for them to do of themselves, and beyond the power of any epileptic fits, or natural disease to effect. Sometimes they were taken dumb, their mouths stopped, their throats choked, their limbs wracked and tormented so as might move an heart of stone, to sympathize with them, with bowels of compassion for them.