Parts IV and V move the story into Salem Village itself, a small farming community tethered to prosperous, merchant-driven Salem Town and increasingly at war with it. Geographic isolation, a stream of traumatized refugees from brutal frontier violence, and constant fear of nearby raids all sharpened the village’s anxiety. Inside the village, long-simmering factionalism hardened into a battle for power, status, and identity, with the Putnam family leading an independence faction and the Porter family defending continued union and commercial ties to the town. Land scarcity and inheritance disputes made Salem unusually litigious, turning neighbor against neighbor. That tension focused on the church, the closest thing to a governing institution, as the village cycled through ministers and fought over control. When Samuel Parris arrived, his unusually aggressive contract terms, including a disputed claim over the parsonage, deepened the split. As resistance to paying assessments grew and Parris’s household became cold and impoverished, his preaching turned more accusatory and apocalyptic, and the community’s cohesion frayed just as it could least afford it. In January and February 1692, the crisis takes a sudden, intimate form when Betty Parris and Abigail Williams begin having violent “fits,” bizarre behavior, and complaints of being pinched and tormented. Dr. William Griggs finds no physical cause and concludes witchcraft, and a desperate parishioner turns to folk counter-magic, baking a “witch cake” from the girls’ urine and feeding it to a dog, a move that enrages Parris and prompts a sermon warning that such acts invite Satan further into the community. The first targets are the predictable outsiders and vulnerable women: Tituba, Parris’s enslaved servant from Barbados, and two local women already marked by poverty, scandal, illness, and social suspicion, Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne. As more girls join the afflictions, the pattern tightens, many are war survivors, servants, orphans, and close neighbors, clustered in households aligned with the Putnam faction. The episode follows the first inquests, held in chaotic public settings with little procedural restraint, no meaningful costs for false accusations, and a growing presumption of guilt. The girls’ collective performances and accusations, amplified by local politics and fear, turn private suffering into public proof, and push Salem from a divided village into the opening phase of a full-scale witch hunt.
