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5. The Witches
5.1. Sarah Osburn, Sarah Good and Tituba
The first one accused of being a witch was Samuel Parris’s slave, Tituba. The second woman was Sarah Good, a woman of “ill repute” and the third woman was Sarah Osburn, who was old and always sick and did not go to church because of her bad health. On March 1, 1691, warrants were sent out for these three to be questioned by John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin, the magistrates (Burr, 1914, p. 80). They questioned the three women in the Salem Village Meeting House.
Where Sarah Good had denied knowledge of the Devil and Sarah Osborne had made only a grudging admission of contact with the occult, Tituba provided a richly textured story of witchcraft in Salem Village. Her responses reflected many of the familiar images from the lore of occult beliefs. Her examination extended well into the afternoon and no doubt held the villagers in rapt attention.
Tituba maintained that there were four other witches active in the village — Good, Osborne, and two women she did not know from Boston. It remains difficult to explain Tituba’s extraordinary testimony. Unlike Good and Osborne, perhaps she sought only to please her listeners and willingly followed wherever John Hathorne’s questions led her. On the other hand, she may have done so out of fear of her master. The author of one contemporary account contended that Tituba said afterward that Parris beat her until she confessed and named her “sister-witches.” (Calef, 1700, p. 343). Given the vivid imagery in her testimony, we may, also, conclude that Tituba may have been describing hallucinations resulting from her occult experiences as a fortuneteller.
5.2. The confessions of the other