This episode explores an often-overlooked driver of the 1692 Salem witch trials: the fear and instability radiating from the Maine and New Hampshire frontier. Against the backdrop of war, raids, refugees, and political turmoil, the hosts trace how frontier experiences and beliefs seeped into Essex County and helped intensify the witch-hunt—connecting key Salem figures to events and accusations rooted far to the north.

00:00 1692 Orders to Secure Maine: Hutchinson’s Mission Begins

00:55 Welcome & Why the Northern Frontier Matters to Salem

01:27 King William’s War: Refugees, Trauma, and Rising Panic

01:58 Mercy Lewis: Frontier Orphanhood and the Afflictions

02:30 George Burroughs: From Maine Settlements to Salem’s Gallows

03:00 “The Eastward” and the Devil in the Woods: Abigail Hobbs’ Confession

03:27 New Hampshire’s Political Upheaval and Early Witchcraft Cases

04:17 Goody Cole: Repeated Accusations and a 1938 Public Rehabilitation

04:59 The Stone-Throwing Devil: Great Island’s Lithobolia Mystery

05:35 Frontier Fear Converges: How War and Wilderness Fueled Salem

⁠Bernard Rosenthal, ed., Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt

The Thing About Witch Hunts / About Salem YouTube channel

⁠Salem Witch Trials Daily Hub

Salem Witch Trials Daily Course Week 7: Families, Geography, and the Machinery of Accusation, February 9-15, 2026

⁠The Thing About Salem

⁠The Thing About Witch Hunts

⁠Emerson W. Baker, A Storm of Witchcraft: The Salem Trials and the American Experience

⁠Marilynne K. Roach, The Salem Witch Trials: A Day-by-Day Chronicle of a Community Under Siege

⁠Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692

Ben Wickey, More Weight: A Salem Story

Peabody Essex Museum Salem Witch Trials Collection

The Sermon Notebook of Samuel Parris, 1689–1694 - Colonial Society of Massachusetts

Richard Hite, In the Shadow of Salem: The Andover Witch Hunt of 1692