My interview with a witch

For my paper I really wanted to interview an expert from the Salem Witchcraft Museum but I was not able to get responses back in time. So I found a real life witch name Kim Spink who lives here in Denver. She is only 19 years old but says she has known she was a witch since she was a little girl. Unfortunately because of our schedules we were unable to do the interview over the phone so it was conducted over email. This interview with Kim made me realizes the witches are more about earth, spirit, and energy. Witches are not all evil devil worshipers who cast spells on others. This makes me think that a lot more of the accusations of the Salem Witch Trials were truly false. Here are a few of my interview questions with Kim.  

Do you think that all the people killed in the Salem Witch Trials were actually witches?

No, I think that a lot of the people of Salem were just scared of the unknown. A few

people made accusations and people followed. I don’t think that anyone should be

sentenced to death, witch or not, but I believe the people who were killed in this time

were not all witches.

When you go out do you ever dress in special witch ware or just in normal clothes?       

Haha I don’t really have special “witch ware” and I am a normal person so I wear normal

clothes. I do have ceremonial attire for special occasions but besides that we as witches

mostly just want to blend in. Wearing all black, scary makeup and pointy hats wouldn't

really help serve that purpose.  Even in the past, witches were not preserved as good so

we wanted to look as normal as possible.

How does it make you feel that people portray witches as ugly woman on brooms who

worship the devil?

I think that a lot of people need to understand that the idea of the devil is actually a

Christian deity and really has nothing to do with witches. What I personally believe is to

be the best person possible, teach others, love people and the earth, honor my

family, forgive, and be true to myself and my beliefs. Besides, why would I want to 

believe what I believe in is evil? Also if you think about it most religious people practice 

a form of magic, it’s just called a prayer.  

Getting to know a witch was definitely interesting. I don’t know if I am completely sold on the whole magic thing but I do believe its each individual prerogative.

Bewitched or Poisoned

The Salem Witch Trial took place in colonial Massachusetts where young girls (including Abigail Williams, Ann Putnam Jr., and Mary Walcott) started acting in odd ways. They would kick, scream, throw things and utter strange phrases. These little girls actions caused community-wide hysteria which led to the deaths of 20 people.


After doing some research on the Salem Witch Trail's I came across some different theories of why these girls started acting the way they did. Rumors of witch craft and curses were the cause of the trials in the first place but what if these actions had another cause and all those people were innocent? I came across the article Witchcraft or Mycotoxin? The Salem Witch Trials. It's from the Academic Journal of Toxicology and can be found when searching the Academic Search Premier database. This article describes research done showing that the reason the girls started acting in these odd ways may not have anything to do with witchcraft after all. Ergot poisoning among livestock was a huge concern in the 1600's and could have been the reason for these odd behaviors. The article goes into more details of symptoms of known people who have been affected by eating affected livestock and how these symptoms are very similar to those of the girls in Salem.
 

All of the sources that I found while doing my research had something to do with the trials and most of them were academic journals. Almost every article I read also had a little summary of the Salem Witch Trial's at the beginning. Besides these few similarities, all the articles I found were completely different. There was some comparing the trials to Harry Potter.Others talked about the gender roles in the Trials; which I will be looking more into for my final paper.

I really like this source and recommend it to others interested in learning more about the Salem Witch Trail's because it puts a modern twist on why the people sentenced to death were innocent. It's a credible source because it's a journal from Harvard Medical School if Clinical Toxicology and was published on June 1, 2000.