Many people believe that the girls' hysterical behavior was all a bunch lies and that they had planned it. I think this is totally true because they were all very good friends. Many theories on the girls' behavior are adolescent hysteria, ergot poisoning, seizures, years of no attention, and adolescent games. Hysteria is described as a display of strong emotional outbursts- crying and screaming- that are followed by unusual physical ailments or bizarre actions. Hysteria can be caused if a medication, herbal tinctures during this time, is not prepared right or the patient took too much of a liquid it could cause dizziness, bad dreams or even hallucinations. (Zeinert, 80) The seeing of the people's specters could have been caused be the hallucinations of overdosing on herbal tinctures.
It has been said that a curse was placed on the Reverend Nicholas Noyes during the Salem Witch Trials. The curse was supposedly placed on him when he pleaded Sarah Good to confess to her sins. She said to him "You are a liar. I am no more a Witch than you are a Wizard [term for male Witch in those times], and if you take away my life, God will give you blood to drink." She was executed right after saying this.
Gallows Hill was a barren and rocky elevation on the western side of Salem Town. Today it has been turned into a small park behind some large buildings. Not very many people know that it is back there. There is a small tarred path that passes by some trees, one of which is alive but looks dead. On this path is permanent witch markings that were made probably by the Witches that live in Salem. The reason I say this oak tree is alive but it looks dead is because it has a curse laid upon it by one of the "Witches" before she was hung. The "Witch" said that this oak tree would remain alive, with the spirits of the people who were hung by it, but look dead. When the tree was cut down it was supposed to release the spirits who would haunt the town of Salem.
On Halloween 1997, 305 years after the last hanging, a group of some 1000 Witches went to the tree and held a ceremony in which the tree was cut down and the spirits released. On Halloween, or Samhain, the Witches New-Year, it is believed that the door between the spirit realm and this realm is open. This is the only time in which a person's spirit, which has died within the past year, of this realm can travel to the spirit realm. I don't think that Salem is now haunted because of this opening between realms unless the cutting happened after midnight.
In her book, Witch Craze: A New History of the European Witch-Hunts, Anne Llewellyn Barstow asks a question that has never been asked before: "Why were most of the victims women?"
