What causes the God-fearing farmers and their families of Salem Village to become an angry mob convinced their own neighbors were consorting with Satan and more than ready to hang them as witches?

At the center of the community tragedy of the 1692 Salem witch trials is how hysteria can come to grip a community. What begins as harmless child’s play—the girls coaxing a reluctant Tituba to tell their fortunes with the pretty cards that Mercy Lewis borrows from Pim—quickly, within weeks, escalates into mass hysteria, a time “of terror and sadness” (251). The Salem community becomes obsessed with the possibility of witches among them. Rumors feed suspicions, and wild, exaggerated claims fuel anger. When Tituba is led from the jail to the meeting house, she must pass through a “howling mob” (218)—farmers and their wives, neighbors of the Parris’s, mothers cradling infants in their arms, even finely dressed men and women from Boston who have journeyed to Salem to watch the spectacle of hysteria. Her neighbors spit on her, throw rotten eggs at her, and chant to hang her. It is as if a fever has gripped the town. The town is consumed by its hysteria fueled by paranoia, fear, ignorance, and superstition.