SOURCE: "Andover Witchcraft and the Causes of the Salem Witchcraft Trials," in The Occult in America: New Historical Perspectives, edited by Howard Kerr and Charles L. Crow, University of Illinois Press, 1983, pp. 38–57.

In the following essay, Hansen emphasizes some differences between the Andover and the Salem witch-craft cases in an exploration of why the latter "got out of hand."

I

Over the past thirteen years American scholars have offered an extraordinary number of explanations of that most grotesque episode in our colonial history, the Salem witchcraft trials. John Demos has suggested that generational hostility was the "underlying" cause. Richard Slotkin has suggested that it was racial hostility: demonic possession in his view becomes merely a neurotic parody of the experience of Indian captivity. Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum have suggested factional hostility. Linnda R. Caporael has suggested that ergotism, a kind of food poisoning occasioned by a fungus...