Cotton Mather was the third generation of Mathers in America, and I’m the twelfth. I’ve known this since I was a kid, not because we have the same last name and he’s in history textbooks, but because my grandmother Claire Mather told me so. Gram walked me through her house, telling me stories of presidents, forbidden love, and inventions. I recognized my own eyes in my ancestors’ paintings and appreciated their humor from their letters. History isn’t some distant remembrance in my family; it has a pulse.
My relatives have done everything from fighting in the Revolutionary War to surviving the Titanic. They’re a colorful and diverse group who definitely made their mark on American history. But Cotton was always a point of controversy. Even when my father was a kid and studied the Salem Witch Trials in school, the other kids gave him a hard time for his last name.
I was always so curious about this infamous man and the reactions he got out of people, even three hundred years later. So I started doing some research. And what I found was surprising—Cotton was way more complex than I had ever imagined. He fought for implementing smallpox inoculations, he wrote America’s first true-crime book, he conducted one of the first experiments in plant hybridization, and he was instrumental in founding Yale. Many writers after him looked to his books as a record of early American Puritan culture.
Nothing about Cotton was straightforward. Historians argue about his role in the Witch Trials. But that’s not just because of Cotton’s complexity. It’s because the Witch Trials were a perfect storm. And the further I dug into the mysterious circumstances surrounding them, the more I wanted to know. So I went to Salem and began poking around.
One of the first things I did there was go to a bookstore and order an out-of-print book about my relatives. When I arrived at the address, it wasn’t a shop like I was expecting, but an old house filled with books. I wrote my name on the order form, and the woman raised her eyebrows and said, “Mather…that isn’t a popular name around here.” I wasn’t offended; I was completely intrigued. No one had ever reacted that way to my last name before. Was I a historical villain of sorts in Salem, if nowhere else?
I knew then that visiting wasn’t enough. I wanted to actually spend a few nights and get a real feel for the place. I walked along cobblestone streets with black houses, took tours, and got goose bumps hearing all the (sometimes creepy) historical stories. But what I wasn’t prepared for was the bed-and-breakfast I chose to stay in. It was a converted old mansion with winding hallways and staircases that stopped and started at random. Beautiful, no doubt. But when I found my room, I couldn’t help but feel like something was off.
I kept looking over my shoulder (and under my bed). I went all the way back down to the reception desk and asked if there was any chance the place was haunted. The woman at the desk nodded and said, “Definitely.” Then she told me how scared she was to lock the place up at night by herself. She said to look in the guest books if I wanted to know about the ghosts. Everything in me told me not to. But of course, I just couldn’t help myself. It was page after page of people waking up to screams, rocking chairs rocking by themselves, and messages written on the steamed mirrors after showers. People traveled from all over the world to stay in this haunted inn, and I had accidentally and unknowingly booked a room there.
I flipped. I’m a huge scaredy-cat. I slept—if you could call it that—the entire night with one eye open and the light on. But what I learned the more time I spent in Salem was that almost everywhere you went there was a haunted house, a curse, or a graveyard. People didn’t ask you if you believed in ghosts, but instead when was the last time you saw one. After a few days, I was utterly charmed by the mysterious history of the town and the secrets that were hidden there. So I wrote a book.
With this story I really wanted to highlight some of the fascinating historical personalities I found in Salem and give them another chance to have a voice. A lot (but not all) of the history in this book is accurate. If there’s a better explanation for the hanging location than Sidney Perley’s essay “Where the Salem ‘Witches’ Were Hanged,” I haven’t found it. However, the causes of the Salem Witch Trials are more complicated than I can tackle in this fictional narrative. But that’s okay, because this story wasn’t only written to revisit history. It was written to be learned from and to specifically show the parallel between hanging a witch in Salem and modern-day bullying.
To understand more about what led up to the Salem Witch Trials, it’s important to consider what we know and how we know it. Then we should examine the lens through which we view the events. Otherwise, it becomes super easy to shake a finger at history while shouting, “You’re all nuts, and your clothes look uncomfortable!”
While addressing the causes of the Salem Witch Trials in my book, I definitely took some artistic liberties. My character Ann, for instance, is only loosely based on Ann Putnam, Jr., who was twelve years old when the accusations started and not the teenager I made her in this story. The black house in the woods is imaginary, but there was an actual house that belonged to John Symonds’s relatives (which is quoted in Perley’s essay and Sam’s grandmother’s journal) from which it was possible to see the hanging location. Unfortunately, this house no longer exists. Also, Cotton’s writings and his role in the Trials themselves are way more involved than what I could capture here. However, there are many real landmarks from old and modern Salem in this story that are worth visiting and exploring.
Even though not all of the historical sites still stand and some information was lost over time, the lessons of the Trials remain relevant. On a basic level, social uncertainty and fear created an unstable emotional environment that allowed things to spiral out of control in Puritan Salem. Some citizens were singled out and made an example of by powerful groups that the community both admired and feared. And once the community supported an accusation of witchcraft, it became nearly impossible for the accused to escape conviction—and punishment.
Where once witchcraft accusations were the norm, bullying has taken its place. And just as during the Trials, it’s not always the usual suspects who get bullied; it can happen to anyone for any reason. But the only way it happens is if the community supports it. Group agreement and group silence are equally as deadly. The moment someone speaks up, it’s possible to stop that cycle. It’s not the easiest thing to do, but greatness is never without risk. And there is nothing greater in the whole world than kindness—kindness to someone being bullied, kindness to a stranger, kindness to an injured animal. Every act counts.