MILFORD – How did people in colonial New England go from gossiping about a neighbor to hanging her for witchcraft?

That is a central question for Margo Burns, who has scholarly and personal reasons for her interest in the 17th century witch trials. Burns is an historian specializing in the trials, and she is also a 10th generation great grandaughter of Rebbeca Nurse, a well respected 71 year-old grandmother who was hanged as a witch by the government of the provenance of Massachusetts Bay in 1692.

The so-called witches and wizards were brought to trial not by torch-carrying crowds, but through a heavily documented legal process, with warrants and juries. Those legal papers are contained in the “Records of Salem Witch-Hunt,” a collection of all the primary sources of the trials, published by the Cambridge University Press.

Burns is the book’s associate editor and last week she gave a lively slide show at the Wadleigh Memorial Library called “The Capital Crime of Witchcraft: What the Primary Sources Tell Us.”

To understand the witch hysteria, she said, it’s important to realize this was a time when people believed that Satan was actively working among them and recruiting followers, people who could shoot “malevolent particles out of their eyes” to harm others.

Possibly adding to the unease was the immigration of many people from the area of York, Maine, a frontier at the time.

In all, about 200 people were accused of witchcraft, 14 women and five men were hanged, and one man was pressed to death. Another woman, Lydia Dustin, was found not guilty but couldn’t pay the jail fee and died in jail.

Their accusers were adolescent girls, and the adults took seriously their stories of “spectral afflictions.” Why did these accusations spread throughout what is now the Salem, Ipswich, Danvers and Andover area?

“Think about middle school girls,” Burns told her audience, and think about the way they’re vulnerable to the power of suggestion.

Burns showed some of the documentary evidence, including bills submitted by a jail keeper, dated Sept. 2, 1692 — for shackles for 10 prisoners, with a list of the people imprisoned, the dates the prisoners came in and how long they stayed.

There were many victims, but only one real villian.

Puritan minister Samuel Parris was the father of one of the afflicted girls, and the uncle of another. Parris had a slave he had brought from Barbados, and the accusation began when the girls accused Tituba of witchcraft.

“I don’t blame him,” Burns said. “He saw Satan attacking his town, his church, his family.”

She does blame Chief Magistrate William Stoughton. Parris eventually apologized for his part, but Stoughton never did, she said. He was ready to hang anyone accused, and during the trial of Rebecca Nurse he sent the jury back to deliberate after they found her not guilty.

“Tell me why you hurt these people,” Stoughton asked Martha Corey, who was a fully covented member of her church when she was accused of practicing witchcraft and hanged on Sept. 22, 1692. She was known for her piety but didn’t believe in witches and had publicly denounced the trials.

The youngest accused was a 4-year-old girl who was imprisoned in a cold jail cell for nine months and went insane. Her mother, Sarah Good, was hanged.

Eventually people got together and decided they had had enough.

“We can’t learn how to predict crazy and evil,” Burns said at the end of her program, funded by New Hampshire Humanities.

“What you can do is respond – come together and say, ‘This is crazy and evil’.”

Kathy Cleveland may be reached at 673-3100 or kcleveland@cabinet.com.