Salem on the Olympic Peninsula: Spectral Evidence in the Witch-Trial of Julie Jaman

Performative trauma, misogyny, and history

During the Salem witchcraft trials, performative trauma got so out of hand that clerks struggled to understand the spectral testimony they were recording

Matthew Hopkins saw demons. His very first affidavit against Elizabeth Clarke attests that she summoned her “imps,” which then appeared one after another as spectral figures of two dogs, a polecat, and a tiny black incubus.

Nor was that the end of the strange sightings he reported. Walking home after this interview, Hopkins wrote that his own dog “suddenly gave a jumpe, and ran as shee had been in a full course after an Hare;”

And that when this Informant made haste to see what his Greyhound so eagerly pursued, He espied a white thing about the bignesse of a [kitten] danced about the said Greyhound and by all likelihood bit off a piece of the flesh of the shoulder of the Greyhound, for the Greyhound came shrieking and crying to this Informant with a piece of fleshe torn from her shoulder.

Hopkins seems to have encountered many cat-demo…