Ann Putnam Jr.

Ann Putnam was born in 1680. She was notably intelligent, well educated, and had a quick wit. She was one of the first village girls to be afflicted other than Betty Parris and Abigail Williams, and was twelve years old when first afflicted. It is believed she was afflicted after listening to Titbua, the Parris’ servant, tell tales of voodoo and other supernatural occurrences from her native Barbados. Shortly thereafter, Ann, along with her friends Mary and Mercy, even began participating in fortune telling. It was during one of these fortune telling events that Ann claimed to have seen a specter in the likeliness of a coffin. After seeing the coffin, she began to portray irregular behaviors and other alarming symptoms and complained of pain. Subsequently, she even began speaking gibberish and became contorted into strange positions and would crawl under chairs and tables.

Ann was one of the most active and one of the youngest accusers. She had claimed to be afflicted by sixty-two people and testified against several in court and offered many affidavits. However, her father Thomas Putnam was the chief filer of complaints in the village, and upheld total control over the actions of the afflicted girls living with him. The majority of the afflicted were in fact related to the Putnam family. Ann’s mother Ann eventually became afflicted as well and the two were known to be quite the actors in the courtroom, so much so that people often travelled to the court to watch them.

In 1706, Ann publically apologized for her participation in the Salem Witch trials. She stood in church as her apology was read aloud, it stated “I desire to be humbled before God. It was a great delusion of Satan that deceived me in that sad time. I did not do it out of anger, malice, or ill-will.” She was one of the only girls to make such an apology. Some believe Ann was manipulated by her parents to “achieve their ends” and was “as much of a victim as she was accused.”

Her parents died in 1699 before she publicly apologized, and she was left to raise her younger siblings as she was the eldest of them. She never married or had children of her own, and died in 1716, she was thirty-seven years old.