Historian Fact Checks Witchcraft Slop

[Narrator] Did you know the witch

on your Halloween decorations

might actually be a portrait of a medieval businesswoman?

No, it's not.

I don't know what the green gas is.

This is the worst thing I've seen

in any of these videos so far,

and I need a timeline and algorithm cleanse immediately.

I'm Mikki Brock,

professor and historian of witchcraft and demonology.

Let's fact check some AI slop.

[upbeat music]

[Narrator] Did you know the witch

on your Halloween decorations

might actually be a portrait of a medieval businesswoman?

No, it's not. Here's why that matters.

For hundreds of years,

women called alewives ran the beer industry across Europe.

Now that's true.

Women have always been involved in the brewing industry

and were really important to the production of ale,

which is what a lot of people drank in the period,

given that water was often contaminated, not safe to drink.

Beer was big business,

and women were deeply involved in that.

[Narrator] They wore tall pointed hats.

There is no evidence

that the vast majority of alewives

wore any certain hat.

That is a fiction.

[Narrator] So customers could spot them

in crowded markets.

They stirred giant cauldrons of brewing ale.

Beer could be brewed in lots of things,

not just cauldrons.

It could be brewed in a sort of regular giant sauce pan

that people might use.

It could be brewed in water buckets.

It was not always being brewed in cauldrons.

And also, I have to add,

in the witch trial records,

cauldrons are actually rarely mentioned explicitly,

even though various domestic instruments

of cooking and other things do show up.

[Narrator] They kept cats

to protect their grain from mice.

A lot of people kept pets.

A lot of people kept cats, and dogs, and other animals.

But cats were associated with heresy and the demonic

long before you have the sort of heyday of the alewife,

and long before the witch trials themselves too.

So cats have this demonic association

completely outside of the fact

that they were owned by these brewers.

But I do enjoy the fact that this is very clearly

playing on the black cat stereotype.

That's an old one.

[Narrator] When a fresh batch was ready,

they hung a broom outside the door as a signal.

Here's the thing about brooms.

They have become one of these stock items

that we associate with witchcraft.

Walk down any street in Halloween,

you see them on front porches and so on.

But witches were believed to fly to demonic Sabbaths

on lots of different objects, right?

They could fly in a broom,

but actually that doesn't show up

as much as you would expect in the British records

from England or Scotland.

It's much more of a continental European idea.

But people imagined that witches flew on pitchforks,

or sticks, or rode animals, goats, other creatures.

Or just flew lifted by the devil's wind itself.

So brooms have stuck around

and I think they've stuck around because they are an object

associated with domesticity,

and women were seen to occupy

the sphere of the home during this period.

So that connection between women and witchcraft

is why broom is so dominant in our imagination,

but it has nothing to do with alewives.

And there are lots of other ways

that people could get to these demonic parties.

Enough of that.

So I just arrived in Salem, Massachusetts, 1692,

and honestly, it's not as bad as I -

Witches gold.

Gold would've been something surprising to see

an ordinary person walking around the streets with

in the context of Salem,

but it's not because people though gold

or jewelry was demonic.

It's because it was expensive,

and because they thought it was a sign of vanity,

a sign that you were devoting your attention in the world

to something ungodly.

She bears the devil's mark.

The other thing about this

is that immediately this guy sees the necklace and says,

It's the devil's mark.

That is not how devil's marks worked.

People certainly believed in this period

that when a witch made a pact with the devil,

she was marked in some way as his servant.

It's kind of an inversion of the baptism ritual.

But the devil's mark was something people searched for.

It's certainly the case that in the Salem witch hunts,

accused people were stripped and searched

for an insensible mark, a strange mark, a discolored mark

that could be seen as evidence

that they had engaged in a deal with the devil.

Okay. Okay.

The jewelry was a bad call.

The jewelry was a really bad call.

So this building right here, this is where it all started.

It didn't start here.

It started in the home of Samuel Paris,

because it was his daughter, Betty,

and his niece, Abigail,

who were the first girls to display signs of bewitchment.

And the minister Samuel Paris didn't immediately say,

Oh my gosh, these kids,

they are clearly taken with the devil or witchcraft.

What he did first was call a doctor to say,

Hey, can we explain this by some other means?

And when the doctor couldn't figure out

what was going on with these bewitched girls

who were having fits, strange contortions,

saying strange things,

that's when people started to strongly suspect witchcraft.

And once the accusations started, they didn't stop.

Over 200 people were accused. 200.

Most of them were just women who didn't fit in.

It is true that most of those accused in Salem

were just ordinary people,

and most of them were women.

But Salem is unusual.

A lot of the women who do get accused in Salem

as the trials progress, they actually do fit in.

They actually are upstanding citizens.

It's only early on in the Salem witch trials

where Tituba, Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne,

the first three accused of witchcraft,

they are the typical outcasts or misfits,

or people who are different.

But later, as the trial goes on,

you do really have some upstanding citizens

who get named as witches.

And that leads to a broader suspicion

among some quarters of the Salem community

about whether or not any of this is accurate at all.

Okay, so this is the part

that genuinely messes with my head a little.

Like, look at this, it's just a normal market.

People buying vegetables, kids running around,

people haggling over carrots.

If you look at this scene

and you look at the fact

that there are people going about their business,

buying and selling wares and food, talking to one another,

it's a good reminder that even though

there were these moments of witch panics,

even though there were periods

where people were tremendously anxious

about the harm that witches could cause to their lives,

people also lived as normal.

People weren't thinking about witches 24/7.

People sometimes lived for years

without even seeing a witch trial,

or even hearing of one from a relative or a neighbor.

Can I ask, what did they say you did?

My neighbor's cow died the morning after we argued.

That was enough.

The thing about this,

My neighbor's cow died the morning

after we argued and that was enough,

the problem with that is it suggests

that all it took for someone to be accused of witchcraft

was one act.

And it's certainly true that in moments of witch panics

where lots of people have been accused,

people could be swept up quite easily for small means.

But typically a witchcraft allegation

came after someone had built a reputation over the years

or had gotten in lots of quarrels

and fights with their neighbors.

And I think to say a cow died,

and it's immediately a threat of witchcraft

kind of undermines how seriously

people in this period took it,

and really wanted to understand

why bad things were befalling them.

And did anyone speak up for you?

Also, no one would've been in jail by themselves.

Jails were crowded.

Jails were full of vermin.

People were sleeping on straw that was often damp,

crawling with mice and other things.

And here, her having a bench

and a jail cell to herself,

even though it doesn't look very nice,

would've been much better conditions

than the average accused witch would've been subjected to.

My husband has mouths to feed,

he cannot afford to be associated with me now.

She's been abandoned by everyone she knows

for a cow.

19 people were executed here. 19.

At least this video gets the hanging part right.

I'll give it that.

And not one of them was a witch.

Like obviously they were just

people accused by other people.

It is true that witches

were just people accused by other people.

But I think we have to be careful in any sort of suggestion

that people in the 16th, 17th Century

were more credulous than we are,

just believed whatever.

They were more gullible, more irrational.

That's not true.

In the context of their perceived reality,

witchcraft was a serious threat.

They were genuinely afraid about what might happen

to their futures, to their families, to themselves.

Witchcraft at its core was about fear.

So without question,

the people who died for this imagined crime of witchcraft

were just ordinary people.

But the accusations that brought them to the gallows,

they were rooted in people being afraid.

Fear is a really dangerous thing

and we should be careful in not assuming that we,

as a society, are any more insulated

from the power of fear or not knowing or otherness,

making us do really horrific things

to our loved ones and to our neighbors.

Enough of that.

[indistinct chattering]

Eyes down. Don't look at her.

Is she the woman from the woods?

So one of the things that's really interesting to me

about this video is the kid asked,

Is she the woman from the woods?

But the thing about witches in the early modern period

is they didn't live apart from the community.

They were believed to be your neighbor, your friend,

an intimate and acquaintance.

And that's what made them so terrifying.

They could be the intimate enemy.

So I think this idea of,

Is that the woman from the woods?

Is that the witch from the woods?

That is very much coming from fairy tales,

that's coming from pop culture.

Even though of course witches in this period

were believed to congregate in the woods,

they didn't live there.

They lived among you.

[Spectator] Witch. She cursed the Bord Boy.

So when that guy crosses himself

when this supposed witch walks by,

the Puritans, which I think this is depicting,

would've found that appalling, right?

The sign of the cross making it over your body

was seen as a very Catholic, even Popeish symbol.

And for the Puritans, that was a no-go.

[dog barking]

[dog whimpering] [crow squawking]

Stay away from her.

The clothing is all wrong here.

Let's take a closer look.

This little girl is wearing a very cute,

but very inaccurate sweater.

The pattern that she has on

is sort of this fair aisle print,

the type that gets developed in Shetland,

in Scotland in the 18th century,

primarily first for fishermen's hats.

No one in the context of 17th century New England

was wearing this pattern with this saturated of colors.

The style is great. The history is bad.

I feel your pain.

Let me also say that if this woman

was genuinely believed to be a witch,

there is no way this mother would just stand there

and let her child be touched by her.

People were afraid of witches.

They believed witches could do harm.

And a lot of that fear was rooted in this idea

that witches could harm children,

could impede fertility,

could cause babies to wither and die.

So unless this is the world's worst 17th century mother,

I highly doubt she would be putting her child

before this purported witch.

[girl breathing heavily]

[crutches clamoring]

Mama, I can feel my legs again.

[crowd gasping]

And one of the things that is really important to know

about the witch hunts is that even white magic,

even good and healing magic was considered by authorities

to be something that involved a deal with the devil.

That's how people understood

that ordinary Jack and Jill peasant

would be able to perform magic at all.

They though they had made a pact with Satan,

so therefore magic in all of its forms,

according to most authorities during this time period,

was in fact demonic.

Let's move on to the next video.

[witch yawning]

[cat meowing]

[Witch] If you take this, you'll feel better.

One of the things that this video is already insinuating

is that the accused witch was actually a witch.

The thing is, while there were of course some wise women

and cunning folk who were accused of witchcraft

during the 16th and 17th centuries,

the vast majority of those accused were not.

Most people were just ordinary men and women, mostly women,

who got caught up in fear and reputation,

and in this sort of chain of events,

this perfect storm that led to the deaths of so many.

So I think it's really misleading to suggest

that an accused witch is waking up,

opening a book, doing a potion, doing spells.

That takes away from the fact

that these truly were innocent people

who were believed to be engaged

in a very deadly demonic conspiracy.

[eerie music]

No, there's no way this street would be so clean.

It would be covered in horse and other animal shit,

I would like to add.

So this is,

this is a very pristine washed street that would not,

you would not have found it anywhere

in the 17th century, much less up until the 20th.

[knocking on door]

[indistinct chattering]

[chains rattling]

[crow squawking] [crowd chattering]

I'm not a witch.

She poisoned my daughter. Guilty.

I will note that in that video they have American accents

as they're saying, She poisoned my daughter.

She's guilty.

That would not have been the case in the 17th century.

The colonist of New England still very much held on

to much of their English dialect.

[Witch] I'm innocent.

[indistinct chattering]

[Spectator] Witch.

A lot of things going on here in this particular scene.

The way that hangings worked in this period

is that the accused climbed up a ladder

and then was turned off the ladder.

The hanging was slow. It was painful.

It was in some ways sort of horrific to watch,

but it wasn't a sort of lights out moment

like you have as later scaffolds get developed,

and trap doors and other things

are sort of built into these sort of structures

of state sanctioned murder.

So this scaffold too is inaccurate for a range of reasons.

[Witch] You brought this on yourselves.

And here again, this video is suggesting

that this was a real witch,

and the subtext is that they were right to execute her.

These were ordinary people. These were not witches.

[witch chanting incantation]

[indistinct murmuring]

[witch laughing]

I don't know what the green gas is.

I got questions about that.

That again is clearly pulling from pop culture.

And of course, this is how AI slop videos work, right?

They scrape what is ever is available in the public domain

and sometimes things that are not available

in the public domain, things that are stolen.

And this is clearly sort of a Disney-fication

of this particular video and I hate it.

All right, next.

[eerie music]

So this one already is fascinating

because here we have kind of quintessential images

of the witches Sabbath,

these nocturnal gatherings witches were believed to have

under cover of darkness, on a mountain, in the woods,

away from human sight.

And people believed at these witches Sabbaths

that all sorts of dastardly deeds were being done.

People were committing cannibalistic infanticide,

having ritual orgies with Satan,

and other various and sundry acts.

But here we have women sort of dancing happily

without any sign of the demonic

or of the things about witchcraft

that people were really terrified of.

So I think this is a really good example

of people reclaiming today

the idea of what witchcraft is,

the idea that when women gather together,

it can be powerful and not necessarily frightening.

[eerie music]

One of the things that is the most sort of archetypal,

the most stereotypical when we think of witches

is of course the pointed hat.

Some people think the pointed hat

comes from antisemitic stereotypes

about what Jews were purportedly meant to wear

in the late medieval period.

Other scholars say the pointy witches hat

is kind of a bastardization of typical headwear

that sometimes Puritans and others wore

that had that kind of triangular shape.

But regardless, the pointed hat doesn't actually become

a mainstay of the witchcraft stereotype

until the 18th century,

until after the witch trials have reached their heyday

and have begun to end.

When you see a pointed hat,

know that it's a feature of popular culture

that has maybe some roots in history,

but is more the product of later depictions of the witch.

Let's move on to the next video.

Day three of not being a witch,

but apparently my herbal tea cured a headache,

so now I'm on trial.

So this video suggests that this woman

gives herbal tea to someone, it works,

and then they're on trial.

That is totally bogus.

If you were an ordinary neighbor,

if you gave a friend or a loved one a tea

because their head hurt, that's normal herbal medicine.

Most people practiced that.

Most witchcraft allegations start with a misfortune.

Your baby dies of a mysterious illness

in the course of two days,

and you don't know what happened to them.

Your husband becomes impotent

and you worry about the future of your line of your family.

Your cow is unable to produce milk like normal.

There's a freak frost that causes your crops to die

much earlier in the season than they should have done.

These are the sorts of things

that made ordinary people think to themselves,

What's the cause of this?

And they didn't immediately go

from zero to she's a witch, right?

They wondered about natural causes.

But in ruling them out,

and if there was someone in their lives

who they didn't trust who had a negative reputation,

that could then spiral into accusing a neighbor,

someone who's in the village

of causing that harm to themselves,

families, livelihoods.

All right, next.

Come closer.

Don't be afraid.

I'll show you what real magic is.

[witch laughing]

So this video has nothing to do

with the actual history of the witch hunts,

or even historical ideas about witches,

so much as our modern pop culture idea of what a witch is.

Everything here is stereotypical, right?

The green potion, the scary face, the hat.

You know, people did believe that some witches

brewed potions and poisonous ointments

and these sorts of things,

but the way this video is presenting it

is very much fantastical, very much Disneyfied,

although a scary Disney.

Disney married with the brothers Grimm.

It's not actually about the history.

Let's move on.

[Judge] Mistress Hale, you are accused

of covenanting with the devil.

Right off the bat,

there are a couple things wrong with this video.

Number one, why are they holding a hearing outside?

It's Puritan, New England.

It is called AF half the time.

They're not meeting outside,

they're not meeting outside in the summer or the winter.

Typically, the trials were held in the Salem Townhouse,

which was a municipal building

that functioned as a courtroom.

No one is standing barefoot out in the dirt

because, of course, the judges themselves

would not wanted to have conducted trials in the elements.

So the location from the outset, wrong.

What say you? I swear before God,

I have done no such thing.

This part is accurate, right?

A lot of the people who were accused of witchcraft

in Salem and elsewhere really attested to their innocence,

and they didn't want to confess to something

that they hadn't done.

These people were concerned about their salvation.

They wanted to be right with God.

So when asked, Have you met the devil?

Have you done his deeds in the woods?

Have you harmed these children?

They often said no until, of course,

in certain times and places,

other sorts of pressure was applied

that led to some people confessing.

So this video is set in Salem,

and in Salem, something interesting happens.

People who are accused of witchcraft and confess,

they actually stay alive

because they are used as witnesses for the prosecution.

The first accused witch, Tituba,

is really a prime example of this.

She confesses, and then that's more fodder for those

who want to go after the scourge of witchcraft

in the community.

That's unusual though.

In other places in Europe, if you confess,

it's the most important,

most surefire evidence to send you to the gallows

or to the fire.

[Judge] The testimonies claim otherwise.

Will you confess and seek mercy?

I am no witch.

That line, I am no witch,

we have records of people in Salem saying that very thing.

I'm not a witch. I've never met the devil.

I would never do this. I'm a godly woman.

So many of these AI slop videos

are purportedly set in Salem.

Now, of course, no Salem that would've been recognizable

to people in the 17th century, but regardless.

And this should cause us to ask,

why does Salem loom so large

in the popular imagination

and in all of the sort of material out there

that AI is vacuuming up and slopping out

into these truly questionable and terrible videos?

And that's because of the prominence of America

in the pop culture market.

It's because of Arthur Miller's The Crucible,

and the film that got made.

It's because of the popularity of the 2015 film,

The Witch.

It's because when people think of a phenomena,

America looms really large.

But Salem is a drop in the bucket

of the broader story of the early modern witch hunts.

Salem, 20 people die.

Now, any loss of life is tragic, right?

19 people are hanged, one is pressed to death,

lots of other people languish in jail,

a lot of other people's lives damaged

because of accusations.

But that's a small number if you look at Europe as a whole,

and you realize that 100,000 people

were accused in Europe

between the late 15th and early 18th century.

And of those, 50,000 people,

mostly women lost their lives.

Enough of that.

[upbeat music]

The first thing I'll say about this video

is it suggests that there's a cohesive idea of a witch

prior to the 14th or 15th century

when the idea of the demonic witch

really develops and solidifies.

So you don't really have the idea of the witch

prior to that in Europe,

at least not in the way that leads to the witch hunts.

So that alone is inaccurate here.

[upbeat music]

So here we're in the heyday of the witch hunts, right,

by the time we get to the second half of the 16th century.

And this video is depicting all of these witches

purportedly over time as being young,

as being beautiful, at the height of their beauty,

which I think is sort of the creator's way of,

well, the AI's way of making this a tragic heroin figure.

But in reality, most of those accused of witchcraft

insofar as we know their ages,

and I should say often we don't,

but many of them were middle-aged, right.

In their 40s, in their 50s.

Now, that's not true everywhere,

but it is a pattern.

And it's a pattern that matters

because often someone was first suspected of witchcraft

when they were young,

the purported age of some of these AI figures,

but they weren't actually accused until decades later

once that reputation,

once that suspicion among their neighbors

had built up and crystallized into something that could lead

to a deadly allegation.

[upbeat music]

Here, actually, you have an image of a supposed witch

that's, I think, meant to be kind of a Puritanesque witch

in the black and white garb.

But 1715, the witch trials had ended

in Puritan, New England.

And ordinary people weren't typically wearing black garb.

It was expensive.

They might wear it when they went to church,

but it wasn't the normal common dress.

[upbeat music]

The only good thing about this video,

and I mean the only,

is the fact that we have very cute cats on display.

And cats are associated with witchcraft

for a couple of reasons.

Cats were associated with heresy

even before the witch trials began

because cats are mysterious creatures, right?

They're both domestic and wild.

They behave in sort of unpredictable ways.

If anybody has ever heard a cat get in a fight,

that is an unholy sound.

And actually, the '90s are representing

this kind of goth phenomenon.

You start actually to see

in some of the later depictions in this video

a much more modern understanding of witchcraft

as something potentially empowering,

something that you opt into.

That's enough AI slop for today and forever.

I hope I cleared some things up.

[upbeat music]