[The fearful delusion of Witchcraft was principally confined to the
county of Essex, in Massachusetts—although there were instances of it in
other portions of New-England. It was there that the evil had its most
powerful work. It was like a heavy judgment from God—the visitation of
an indescribable and unaccounted for curse—the passing over of a shadow
upon the mental atmosphere like that of a thunder-cloud upon the physical
The following story is founded on a passage in the singular works of Cotton
Mather, where that learned divine informs us that at the dead of night, the
“witches and prestigious spirits and demons,” who persecuted, by means of
their spells and incantations, the good people of Massachusetts Bay, were assembled
together by the sound of a great trumpet. The place of the evil
gathering was somewhere near Naumkeag, now Salem.]
