Rebecca Nurse: The Churchgoing Grandmother
Public DomainUnlike other Salem witches, Rebecca Nurse was a well-liked and respected member of the community.
Most of the Salem witches were outsiders. But Rebecca Nurse was a well-liked member of the Salem community. Her arrest shocked many.
Nurse, like many of the others, was accused of witchcraft by a number of girls in town. But why? Some suspect that the accusation came from a feud between Nurse and another family in town. Others think that the girls targeted Nurse because she’d scolded them for practicing fortune-telling.
“We cannot imagine the cause of the alleged complaint of witchcraft,” noted An Account of the Life, Character, & c. of Reverend Samuel Parris, a tome on Salem’s minister. “She appears to have been an amiable and exemplary woman, and well educated for the times in which she lived.”
Regardless of her sterling credentials in Salem, Nurse stood accused of being a witch. And in 1692, that could be a death sentence.
“I can say before my Eternal Father I am innocent and God will clear my innocence,” Nurse insisted at her trial. Calling herself as innocent as a “child unborn,” Nurse declared, “The Lord knows I have not hurt [anyone].”
At first, it seemed that Nurse’s testimony and reputation might save her life. Citizens even signed a petition in her support. But when the court declared her not guilty, the girls she’d “bewitched” had a new round of fits.
Nurse was soon hanged. But her story stands out among all the Salem witches. In Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, Nurse is described as a kind, gentle woman — and a sign of how hysterical the Salem witch trials had become.
