Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 3 (1925-03).djvu/78

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THE SALEM HORROR
77

with the devil, and Sarah Osburn had shown she was home in bed at that very time—why, forsooth, she was in both spots at the same moment, and therefore, more undoubtedly a witch than ever!


Tituba, Sarah Osburn and Sarah Good were sent to Ipswich jail as convicted witches, there to lie awaiting the hangman's convenience.

Exposure and the weight of the heavy iron fetters riveted on her wrists and ankles proved too much for Mrs. Osburn. She died in jail.

Tituba, because she had confessed, and especially because she had made the other two women's conviction possible, was granted a pardon and sent to Boston to be sold as a slave, where, it was supposed, she would fall into the hands of an owner who would take her and her power for working evil far away from Salem Village. Perhaps the fact that her removal would prevent her babblings from connecting the Reverend Mr. Parris with the inception of the witchcraft prosecutions might have had some weight.

Sarah Good lived to mount the gallows. As she stood with the rope about her throat, a clergyman said, "Thou art a wicked witch!"

"You are a liar," replied the old woman with spirit. "I am no more a witch than you are, and if you take my life God will give you blood to drink."


The second of Seabury Quinn’s true tales of witchcraft will
describe the accusations of evil made by our Puritan an-
cestors against Giles and Martha Corey, whose mem-
ory has been preserved in Longfellow's poem-
drama. The spectacular death of the "stub-
born wizard" Giles Corey beneath a beam,
and the hanging of his wife Martha
on Gallows Hill, belong to the
darkest period of America's
history. In WEIRD
TALES next month,
on sale at all
news stands
March
First