A Delusion of Satan - The Full Story of the Salem Witch Trials

1. The final part of this climax ends with the hangings of at least nineteen people with another 150 in jail for witchcraft and with 300 new accused witches.
2. The cruelest death came to Giles Cory when he refused to go to trial because he knew how all the others who were sent to trial died. He saw no point in going and refused to go so they pressed him. Pressing was when you put rocks on a person until they said innocent or guilty. Giles only said more weight until he was crushed.
3. The Puttmans justified this by saying that Ann Putman saw a vision of Giles doing the same thing to one of his servants who was mysteriously murdered seventeen years ago.
4. Everyone else such as Rebecca Nurse, George Burroughs, and Martha Cory were hanged unless they confessed.
5. The witchcraft Hysteria ended when the afflicted went so far as to say that the Governor’s wife was a witch. That was a mistake. The Governor then made a law that stated you needed real evidence to convict people and not just the girls visions. The rest of this book went into finer detail about the trials and the fight to keep it going.
Questions
1. What happened to Giles Cory?
2. How did it make you feel?
3. Who were some of the people hanged?
4. How did the witch hunt end?
Vocab.
1. Crushed. To break, pound, or grind.
2. Evidence. That which tends to prove or disprove something.
3. End. The concluding part of an action, story, etc.
Literary terms
1. Falling action. The witch hunt started to lose support.
2. Resolution. The hysteria final ended with the Accusing of the Governor’s wife.
Conclusion
It is important that we never forget these tragic events and also not ever fall into enough dismay to make us kill nineteen people.