What Caused the Salem Witch Trials Hysteria of 1692?

Mariia Malis

Mr. Hoobs

American History

2 September 2018

What caused The Salem Witch Trials Hysteria of 1692?

Salem Witch Trials of 1692, were an occasion for variety of disputes of what caused such an event to happen. Multiple people were falsely accused of witchcraft due to immature views of 17th century society, which caused our time community to come up with a question of what was the real cause of Salem Witch Trials. There are a lot of different interpretations and theories of events that took place. Two factors, which caused deaths of falsely accused civilians was an illness and false religion beliefs.

Salem Witch Trials was caused by the disease that struck several people during a 17th century. Most of the accusations were made when epidemia of strange symptoms appeared. Some of the civilians started to experience body seizures, seeing things that are not appeared to be real and crawling sensations in the skin (Document N). That kind of behavior could start with people consuming products like: cereal grains or rye props poisoned with ergot. Ergot has a very similar composition to LCD chemicals (Document N). The influence of ergot forced people to hallucinate and take every strange sign from their body to think of a curse that was brought by evil upon them. The fault of inexplicable sickness was put on neighbors and everyone who acted abnormal to views of society of that time. Accused of witchcraft were put to jail and then executed. However, disease