Tituba, the Mysterious Woman Who Sparked the Salem Witch Hunt

The court testimony of Tituba, the enigmatic woman who sparked the Salem witch trials, was as explosive as it was likely fictional.

An enslaved woman who was among the first to be accused of witchcraft in Salem, Tituba told riveting tales of a witch’s coven, evil animals and malevolent spirits that seemed to explain the odd symptoms that overtook a group of young Salem girls in 1692.

But what do we really know about the woman whose testimony led to Salem’s witch hunt?

Tituba’s story is as convoluted as any other part of the Salem witch trials. During those notorious events of 1692—which ultimately led to 25 deaths—reckless accusations, superstitious legends and wild rumors were common. It’s hard to untangle them from a distance, and most of what historians know for sure about Tituba comes from the court testimony she gave during the infamous Salem witch trials.

Historians generally agree Tituba was a woman of color: She may have been of biracial or multiracial ancestry—she was possibly an indigenous Central American—and she was often referred to as an "Indian" by Salem's Puritan settlers. Likely born in the 1660s, Tituba enters the historical record as an enslaved servant in the house of Reverend Samuel Parris, a Puritan minister.

At the time, slavery in the American colonies was on the rise, and the West Indies was rapidly becoming Europe’s most important center for the slave trade. Parris bought Tituba in Barbados and brought her to Massachusetts in 1680, when she was a teenager. At some point, she is thought to have married another enslaved man named John Indian, and the couple had a daughter, Violet.

Tituba cared for the Parris children, and Parris’ daughter and niece were among the first girls who began showing strange symptoms in 1692. According to some sources, the two girls were playing a fortune-telling game that involved dropping an egg white into a glass of water. Supposedly, the form the egg white took in the water could predict the girls' future. After the girls saw a coffin in one of the glasses, they began barking, babbling and crying hysterically.

Though she apparently had nothing to do with the girls’ attempt at fortune telling—a grave sin in a Puritan household—Tituba tried to help them. She baked what New Englanders called a “witch's cake” made from rye meal and the girl's urine and fed it to the Parris family's dog. According to folklore, if the dog began acting like the girls, the presence of witchcraft was confirmed.

Reverend Parris, who had already been praying and fasting in an attempt to cure the girls of what he saw as possession, became incensed when he heard Tituba had made a witch's cake. He beat her severely to get her to confess that witchcraft was the reason behind the girls’ increasingly odd behavior.

Tituba did confess—and embellished her confession with an embroidered tale of how she had been told to serve the Devil. She and the girls rode on sticks, she said, and described a menagerie of creatures including a huge black dog, a black cat, a hairy animal that walked on two legs and a being with “wings and two legs and a head like a woman."

This coerced confession was enough to spark hysteria in Salem. Tituba and two other women—Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne—were formally accused of witchcraft, arrested and jailed awaiting trial before the magistrates of Salem.

“She could not have expected to be accused,” writes historian Stacy Schiff. "New England witches were traditionally marginals: outliers and deviants, cantankerous scolds and choleric foot-stompers. They were not people of color.”

However, as panic swept through Salem, it was all too easy to scapegoat people of color and other marginal members of society. Good, who was arrested along with Tituba, was a beggar who was looked down on by the town for her financial instability and her debts.

Osborne also lived on Salem’s margins—she was involved in a dispute with her children over their dead father’s estate and was reviled for an affair with an indentured servant. All three women were perfect targets for accusations of deviant, even evil, behavior.

Tituba’s bizarre testimony before the assembled magistrates was deeply disturbing to the people of Salem. She had seen “two rats, a red rat and a black rat,” she told the packed courtroom. “They said serve me.” Tituba also confessed to pinching the girls and told the court that she had signed a “Devil’s book.”

The people of Salem associated supernatural practices like voodoo with people of color and Indians, and the townspeople identified Tituba as both. Her confession was enough to convince the town that true evil was afoot. As the trials spun further and further out of control, Tituba remained imprisoned.

She was indicted as “a detestable Witch” and languished in jail for more than a year, as Reverend Parris refused to pay her bail. Meanwhile, more and more indictments and arrests piled up as Salem fell prey to a region-wide panic that resulted in the deaths of 25 people, 19 of whom were hanged despite little factual evidence.

Later, Tituba recanted her testimony, telling the magistrate that she had made up everything after her master beat her in an attempt to force a confession. By then, the trials had wound down and the governor of Massachusetts had ordered the arrests to stop. Eventually an anonymous person paid Tituba’s bail and she went free after 13 months behind bars.

Eventually, the state of Massachusetts gave Salem’s accused people back their property and provided some restitution. However, notes historian Veta Smith Tucker, Tituba—a enslaved woman with no property and no rights—was given nothing. She disappeared from the historical record from that point on.

Since so little is known about Tituba, her story is easy to fictionalize. In the years after the trials, she became popular in literature and lore. But in reality, she seems to have been a marginal figure whose low social status put her in the perfect position to be accused of witchcraft in a town desperately searching for answers.