Good evening and welcome to boring books for bedtime. I hope tonight's installment provides all the boredom your busy brain needs to quiet down and let you get some sleep for once.

So lie back, adjust your volume. Take a nice deep, and off we go.

In honor of Halloween and the spooky season,

this evening we're reading one of the original works about the Salem witch trials from one of the participants.

Tonight's book is The Wonders of the Invisible World, Being in a country. is the by the Reverend Cotton Mather, Doctor of Divinity,

to which is added a further account of the trials of the New England

Witches by the Reverend Increase Mather, Doctor of Divinity, and President of Harvard College,

first published in 1693 and later revised in 1862, published by John Russell Smith, Sooho Square, London.

Let's begin.

Introduction. The two very rare works reprinted in the present volume, written by two of the most celebrated

of the early American divines, relate to one of the most extraordinary cases of popular

delusion that modern times have witnessed.

It was a delusion moreover to which men of learning and piety lent themselves and thus became the means of increasing it. The scene of this affair was the Puritanical

colony of New England, since better known as Massachusetts.

The colonists of which appear to have carried with them in an exaggerated form

the superstitious feelings with regard to witchcraft which then prevailed in the mother country.

In the spring of 1692, an alarm of witchcraft was raised in the family of the minister of Salem, and some black servants

were charged with of supposed crime.

Once started, the alarm spread rapidly, and in a very short time a great number of people fell

under suspicion, and many were thrown into prison on very frivolous grounds,

supported as such charges usually were by very unworthy witnesses.

The new governor of the colony, Sir William Phipps, arrived from England in the middle of May, and he seems to have been carried away by the excitement

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