028: Strange Terrors
Pleasing Terrors
Mike Brown
4.9 • 1.3K Ratings
🗓️ 20 October 2017
⏱️ 38 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Alyson Horrocks from the Strange and Unusual Podcast took me on a tour of a historical site with a dark past. The site sits in a town called Danvers, but it was once Salem Village. This site was the culmination of a strange mix of religion, superstition, folklore, slavery, patriarchy, truth, and lies.
A place where people's imagination or secret motives ran wild and story or lie or desperate attempt at redemption led to the basis for one of the darkest times in colonial American History. What started as a search for freedom to pursue religion and all things good, and ended in a nondescript historical site and archaeological dig, has a sinister history with a story that is hard to tell and even harder to understand.
- Salem Village was settled in the late 1600s
- In 1970, Richard B. Trask started excavating the "Danvers Dig"
- 1688 Samuel Parris moved into the house that once stood at the dig.
- Parris brought an enslaved South American couple named John and Tituba.
- In 1692, the invisible world began to close around the Parris family.
- Using Venus Glass and taking a peek into the invisible world.
- How it's human nature to be drawn to what is forbidden
- In January of 1693, Betty Parris daughter of Samuel, and cousin Abigail were stricken with mysterious illnesses.
- Sarah Good and her daughter visit the Parris home.
- Dr. Griggs determines the affliction of Betty and Abigail is supernatural in nature.
- Thomas Putnam goes to the Salem Town magistrates to file claims of witchcraft.
- A woman's final plea for freedom opens the floodgates of imagination and evil to begin a dark era of lies and persecution.
Resources:
The Salem Witch Trials: A Day-by-Day Chronicle of a Community Under Siege
The Strange and Unusual Podcast
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Breathe taking landscapes, mythical creatures, a people cast from the frozen rocks, time travel to a world of adventure, ritual, and mystery. Time travel with the Twilight |
| 0:19.8 | Histories podcast. It's said that when Alexander conquered East, the Buddha conquered West. |
| 0:37.0 | Now the Greek world is finally, finally at peace. The trumpets rumble from the Acropolis while you debate the |
| 0:48.8 | Darma and the Agara. Do not dwell in the past. Do not dream of the future. Just be. Time travel with the twilight |
| 1:01.1 | histories podcast. with the Twilight Histories Podcast. Some stories were never supposed to be told. |
| 1:17.0 | Stories that exist in the twilight between science and the supernatural, |
| 1:24.2 | between history and the horror, |
| 1:27.3 | stories that speak of terrifying things, |
| 1:31.5 | stories that you want to hear, stories that you need to hear, stories that will sink |
| 1:38.6 | their teeth in and never let you go. |
| 1:45.0 | My name is Mike Brown, and this is pleasing terrors. Episode 28, The Invisible World Part 1 Strange Terrors |
| 2:07.0 | It is early on the evening of August 20th, 2017, and we have just parked in the empty lot of the First Church of Danvers, Congregational. |
| 2:25.4 | We are here to visit a historic site with a very dark history. |
| 2:31.4 | As a tour guide in Charleston, South Carolina, I am used to doing that on almost a nightly basis. |
| 2:38.0 | But here, I am a tourist, and my guide this evening is Allison Horrocks of the strange and unusual |
| 2:47.4 | podcast. She has graciously agreed to bring me to this place and show me its secrets. |
| 2:56.1 | She has been here before. |
| 3:01.2 | The town of Danvers, named after one of its residents, Danvers Osbourn, was incorporated in 1757. |
| 3:10.0 | But it was first settled over a hundred years prior to that. |
| 3:15.0 | In the late 1600s, it was a small collection of farms clustered around a tavern and a meeting house. |
| 3:24.0 | It was a small place, but it has cast a large shadow over colonial American history. |
| 3:31.0 | In those days, Danvers went by a different name, Salem Village. |
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