"_Note._ As soon as she was well bound they all had strange and sudden ease. Mary Walcott told the magistrates, that this woman told her, she had been a witch this forty years."
The foregoing record shows the fearful ordeal to which any one might be subjected upon whom an accusation of witchcraft fell, and the hopelessness of escape where spectral evidence was admitted and held to be reliable. Here was a woman who, it seems, had been conscious of spirit presence with her for "forty years," and her constitutional properties which permitted this were so luminous in the spiritual atmosphere, or medium of vision by inner eyes, that the clairvoyant girls readily caught sight of her, readily felt influences from her, and therefore accused her of tormenting them.
The general character and deportment of this woman prior to her arrest may not have won public approbation. When in presence of the magistrates she was self-possessed and not lacking in boldness; for otherwise she would not have told the judge that his own presence was the only black man she had seen there. She told her examiners that it was shameful for them to mind "these folks, who are out of their wits." She said to the girls, "You lie; I am wronged." Her presence permitted extraordinary visions, contortions, sufferings, and outcries, and probably emanations from her were special helps to the unwonted outflow.
_In trance_, one saw thirteen dead bodies, and charged the accused with having murdered them. It was _in trance_ that this was seen and said. If _entranced_, was the girl, then, a voluntary seer and speaker? No. Supermundane force was in action there. Entrancements and obsessions came upon all those youthful accusers fitfully--and the forms of the girls generally were tools operated by wills entering from outside. The tongue of that entranced accuser, like Ann Cole's, probably was "improved to utter thoughts that never were in her own mind."
Four of Mrs. Carrier's children were brought into court in company with herself, either as accused ones or as witnesses against some members of the family. "Before the trial," says Drake, "several of her own children had frankly and fully confessed not only that they were witches themselves, but that their mother had made them so." The artlessness and simplicity of their _confessions_ render them not simply entertaining, but more instructive than almost any other statements made at the examinations and trials. Little Sarah was asked,--