By autumn, it had all developed into very grown-up business. Soon, word spread through Salem: They had been bewitched. Nine-year-old Betty Parris, the parson’s daughter, and her 11-year-old cousin, Abigail Williams, had always been model children, “well Educated and of good Behaviour,” according to one chronicle.
The primary sources adopt a tone of perplexity. The strangest thing-to any person who has spent more than 10 minutes on a grade-school playground-is that it was strange at all.īut standards of behavior for young girls were more exacting in 17th-century New England than they are today. In the village minister’s house, two little girls crawled under the furniture, made silly noises, spread their arms out like wings and tried to fly.
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