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of killing her first husband, had been beaten regularly by her second husband, and quarreled late into the night with her third.
    Bishop had never once set foot in Salem Village, but on April 18, she was placed under arrest because her specter had supposedly flown there to torture five Salem Village girls. She was questioned the very next day. First, the girls said she was a witch. Then the magistrate himself accused her of bewitching her first husband to death. Bishop insisted that she knew nothing about such attacks, shaking her head and rolling her eyes in frustration. As usual, the five afflicted girls blamed Bishop’s specter when their own heads shook violently back and forth and their own eyes rolled wildly in response.
    “I am innocent,” Bishop testified. “I never saw these persons before, nor I never was in this place before. I have made no contract with the Devil. I never saw him in my life!” At that, Ann Putnam Jr. shouted out: “She calls the devil her God!”
    Recorder Ezekiel Cheevers noted that “two men told her to her face that she is taken in a plain lie. 5 afflicted persons do charge this woman to be the very woman that hurts them…all her actions have great influence upon the afflicted persons and they have been tortured by her.”
     
    A s spring breezes warmed the air of Salem on May 10 and 11, a farmer named George Jacobs Sr. and his granddaughter Margaret were being questioned by the magistrates when Margaret confessed that she was a witch. Then she testified that her grandfather—and a reverend named George Burroughs—were both wizards. (By May, plenty of people knew that if you confessed, you would be treated much better than suspects who claimed they were innocent. If you named extra suspects, you even got to stay in a nicer part of the jail.)
    Now it just so happened that Margaret’s grandfather was a toothless, 80-year-old man with rheumatism who could only walk with the aid of two walking sticks. Yet despite his sorry physique, 12 screeching accusers exclaimed that Jacobs’s specter had beaten them. Lewis joined the fray: “He did torture me most cruelly by beating me with two sticks and almost put my bones out of joint, but I told him I would not write in his book if he would give me all the world.”
    This particular testimony made Jacobs laugh out loud in court. When the magistrate asked why, he said: “Because I am falsely accused. Your worships, do all of you think this is true?” he asked incredulously. “I am as innocent as your worships.”
    Sarah Churchill, George Jacobs’s maidservant, had already confessed to being a witch to save her own self. In her desire to be let off the hook, she became Jacobs’s strongest accuser. And maybe she had another reason, too. When she had told Jacobs earlier that fits were keeping her from doing any work, he had called her a “bitch witch.” Here’s what else he said at his hearing:
    George Jacobs: You tax me for a wizard. You may as well tax me for a buzzard! I have done no harm. The devil can go in any shape.
    Magistrate: Not without [your] consent. Why do you not pray in your family ?
    Jacobs: I cannot read. Burn me or hang me I will stand in the truth of Christ.



CHAPTER SIX
THE KING OF HELL
    I n the little northern frontier town of Wells, Maine, most everybody liked and respected their minister, a short, strong, dark-haired man named George Burroughs with a history of performing heroic deeds for his neighbors. During just the previous summer, for example, he had helped his fellow citizens escape from Indian attacks when warriors snuck up to three nearby towns and laid them all to waste. One of Burroughs’s admirers called him “self-denying, generous, and public spirited.” Another who knew him well wrote that “he was an able, intelligent, true-minded man; sincere, humble in spirit, devoted as a minister, and generous as a citizen.” Also acknowledged as an excellent athlete and a scholar, Burroughs willingly