Elder Ballou Meeting House & Burying Ground - Haunted Rhode Island.
🟡 Check out my Book: "INTO THE UNKNOWN - True Stories of a Pilot Cheating Death" on Amazon for $12.95 USD - www.amazon.com/Into-Stories-P...
🟢 Connect up on Faces' INSTAGRAM to see SEMI-LIVE Video & Images at the SCENE, as we produce upcoming episodes:
/ facesofthoseforgotten
🔵 LET'S HELP BUY GRAVESTONES FOR THOSE WHO HAVE NOT. Consider helping support this channel, because sadly, sometimes I come across a known grave location with no marker, and sometimes I have bought that person a gravestone. Your donations here can help offset some of these costs. We have some folks already helping to build a pot for this. Let's try to make some of those names forgotten - remembered.
HERE IS WHERE TO DONATE:
🔵 PATREON MONTHLY PLEDGE - / facesoftheforgotten
- or -
🔵 Make a ONE TIME DONATION - www.paypal.com/donate?busines...
THIS STORY:
Witch trials and hangings were rampant throughout New England from the middle 1600's. The only escape for the accused or condemned was to confess and claim to negate the pact with the Devil, or to escape south out of New England to New York or Pennsylvania where witchcraft was not punished. Most of the accused were not wealthy enough to escape south fast enough to stay ahead of the sheriff sent to detain them.
The Elder Ballou family saw the handwriting on the wall and left Salem just before the witch hysteria permeated through Salem, Massachusetts. And it is here in Cumberland, Rhode Island, where they finally found their refuge from possible persecution, torture and death, which others later endured.
In the late spring 1692, a number of unnatural or unexplained events took place and members of the town of Salem were frightened about their future survival. About that same time, a group of adolescent girls in Salem began having strange fits, during which they accused several people, primarily middle-aged women, of being witches.
Some young girls there had learned that by having screaming spasms and accusing women of witchcraft, the adults started paying attention to them. As their importance grew, so did the number of their accusations. The evidence they stated was always spectral: based on dreams and visions. Officials convened a court to hear the charges of witchcraft.
Many of the accusers came from a traditional way of life tied to farming and the church, whereas a number of the accused witches were members of a rising commercial class of small shopkeepers and tradesmen.
Amazingly, those who confessed to being witches - whether it was true or not - were not executed. The Puritans believed that once a person made a full confession, his or her fate should be left in God’s hands, not man’s. These confessors were kept apart from the other prisoners, and were called upon to testify in other trials if they could be helpful to the prosecution. 55 people in the Salem area confessed to witchcraft in 1692.
From June through September of 1692, 19 men and women were carted to Gallows Hill, a barren slope near Salem, for hanging. Another man named Giles Corey, of an age over 80 years, was pressed to death under heavy stones in an empty field on Howard Street, which was next to the jail in Salem Village. He had refused to submit to a trial on witchcraft charges. More than 100 others were still in jail - among them some of the town’s most prominent citizens.
The witch hysteria began to spread to other communities, which greatly concerned some citizens. On October 3, 1692 Increase Mather, then president of Harvard, denounced the use of spectral evidence: “It were better that ten suspected witches should escape than one innocent person be condemned.” In response Massachusetts Governor William Phipps prohibited further arrests, released many accused witches and dissolved the Court on October 29.
Then, almost as soon as it had begun, it was over. Phipps pardoned all who were in prison on witchcraft charges by May 1693. On January 14, 1697, the General Court ordered a day of fasting and soul-searching for the tragedy at Salem. In 1702, the General Court declared the trials unlawful; in 1711, they passed a bill restoring the rights and good names of those accused and granted 600 pounds restitution to their heirs.
THIS CHANNEL:
_________________________________________________________
The Angel face you see is the Haserot, named “The Angel of Death Victorious". The stoic angel is seated on the marble gravestone of canning entrepreneur Francis Haserot and his family. Holding an extinguished torch upside-down, it represents a symbol of life extinguished.
IN THE END, DEATH ALWAYS WINS. LEST THE FACES NOT BE FORGOTTEN.
25 окт 2023
