Rose’s Reviews > The Witches: Salem, 1692 > Status Update

Okay was anybody going to tell me that Walt Disney was a descendant of George Burroughs, the only minister executed for witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials, or was I just supposed to read that in this book myself???

“The question is not why they retailed preposterous stories but why in 1692 they were believed; it is easier to understand their real or artificial visions than the vertiginous tales of everyone else. (‘Indeed,’ notes a modern psychiatrist, ‘a sane adolescent would have something wrong with her.’)”

“Hysteria is contagious and attention addictive; wanton self-abuse comes naturally to a teenager.”
This book is offering the best most plausible explanation for the Salem “bewitchings” I’ve ever read. No they didn’t have fungus in their grain or whatever, a bunch of teenagers wanted attention and to get out of doing work and it got really out of hand from there