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    Reverend Burroughs had not spent his entire life in Maine. During the early 1680s, he had served two years as the minister of Salem Village and even lived in the same house now occupied by Reverend Parris. Burroughs had headed for Maine after two grave misfortunes befell him in Salem: first, his wife died, and then he got into a bitter dispute with the Putnam family over a debt he owed for her funeral expenses. He had no money because he had never received his salary.
    Though it had been ten long years since he had lived in Salem Village, Burroughs was certainly not forgotten, because on April 20, 1692, Thomas Putnam’s daughter, Ann, swore that she had seen the apparition of a minister. Ann claimed she had been grievously afraid, crying, “Oh dreadful! dreadful! Here is a minister! Are Ministers witches too? What is your name? He told me that his name was George Burroughs.” And the next evening, Reverend Parris’s niece Abigail Williams also reported that former minister Burroughs was a wizard!
    Two weeks later Burroughs was eating dinner with his family up in Maine, when he heard a ruckus outside his door. In marched Maine’s field marshal, Jonathan Partridge, along with a small band of soldiers. Had they come to help the citizens of Wells fight off Indian attacks? Certainly not! They had come to arrest Burroughs, and arrest him they did. Despite the fact that his neighbors looked up to him as a friend and counselor, Burroughs was immediately escorted all the way down to Salem Town, where he was “Suspected to have Confederacy with the devil.”
    Even in Salem, where everyone suspected everyone else of witchcraft, people argued fervently about Burroughs’s guilt or innocence. One frontier militia leader said he was “a Choice Child of god, and God would Clear up his Innocency.” Others thought he was a wife-beater. And yet another swore he had an Evil Eye and “he was the Cheife of all the persons accused for witchcraft or the Ring Leader of them.”
    By July, a 15-year-old girl from Andover named Mary Lacy Jr., who had confessed that she was a witch, would claim that she had flown to a secret communion where 77 witches were drinking blood and eating blood-colored bread. It was there that she saw a woman named Martha Carrier, also from Andover, who was supposed to have killed 13 people and was now Hell’s own Queen. And it was there, too, that she saw the Devil make a promise: Reverend George Burroughs would soon be crowned the King of Hell.
    Burroughs was examined several times in front of enormous crowds between the day of his first witchcraft investigation on May 9 and his final official trial in Salem Town on August 5. At least 30 accusers would pile up a mountain of sworn testimony against him. What did they say? Some truly amazing things.
    Ann Putnam Jr. said, “He told me he had had three wives: and that he had bewitched the first Two of them to death: and he bewitched a great many soldiers to death at the eastward.” These soldiers had died three or four years earlier during battles they lost against the Indians, and some of Burroughs’s detractors insisted that he was in cahoots with the enemy French and Indian soldiers. Since Puritans thought the Indians were devils, they believed that Burroughs must be in cahoots with the Devil, too. Then Ann said, “He told me that he was above a witch, he was a conjurer.” She embellished her story even more later on:
    …immediately there appeared to me the form of Two [dead] women in winding sheets; and they turned their faces towards Mr. Burroughs and looked very red and angry and told him that he had been a cruel man to them and that their blood did cry for vengeance. Then the Two women turned their faces towards me and looked as pale as a white wall and told me that they were Mr. Burroughs’ first Two wives and that he had murdered them: and one told me that he stabbed her under the left Arm and put a piece of sealing