SPECTRAL EVIDENCE is a ritual spell for for all of those executed, who died in prison, or were forced to confess during the Salem Witch Trials, and for the countless unnamed persons who have suffered violence and incarceration at the hands of the white supremacist cishet capitalist patriarchy under the guise of purity and religious piety.
The Salem Witch Trials resulted in the arrests of nearly 150 people. Twenty people were executed for their alleged participation in witchcraft and five people, including the infant daughter of Sarah Good, died in prison. While in prison, the accused were often chained to the walls of the dark, cold, wet, rat-infested basement dungeon. The majority of those accused were women, who were repeatedly forced to undergo physical examinations of their naked bodies for alleged “marks of the devil.”
Despite any formal legal training, William Stoughton was appointed as chief justice and prosecutor during the trials. Stoughton deliberately disregarded established legal protections for those accused of witchcraft, depriving them of council and allowing closed conversations between accusers and judges. Despite opposition, he insisted on allowing spectral evidence into the court proceedings; witness testimony that a person’s spirit or spectral shape could appear in a dream at a time when their physical body was elsewhere and that the devil and witches were powerful enough to send their spirits to lead innocent, religious people astray. In order to save their own lives, the accused had no other option but to admit to crimes they had not committed, or maintain their innocence and be executed. Stoughton not only refused to apologize for the pain and death he inflicted during the trials, but afterwards became acting governor of the colony, dying a prosperous landholder in nearby Dorchester, where he is buried.
Background photograph by Carol DeGuiseppi. "Nunca Jamás" performed by Sad Songs, written by Oscar Chávez. Oscar Chavez was one of Mexico’s most beloved leftist musicos, a champion of the everyday human, politicizing traditional Mexican folk music and creating songs of protest throughout the 1960s to highlight systemic inequality. Nunca Jamás tells the story of the universal gloom of pain, the labyrinth that is romantic love, and the price of regret (Sad Songs). Chávez passed away on 30 April 2020 from COVID-19. He was 85.