their village. The children still were not able to come up with names for their perpetrators until a little thirteen-year-old girl, Ann Putnam, cried out the name of Martha Corey. Corey, like Osborne, was not poor at all. While she was being tried, Martha Corey had the audacity to laugh at questions presented to her. She acted naive and said she did not even know if there were any witches in New England She also labeled herself as a "Gospel-woman." Her presence and attitude during the trial led many to believe that she was in fact guilty of practicing witchcraft. From this point on, after Ann Putnam's accusation, the females of Salem showed no hesitation in naming the witches who had brought this upon them. The number of women accused was monumental, and the court had very little time to examine each accusation thoroughly. Soon, anyone who was called a witch was jailed, whether it was a man, woman, child, or adult. Even Dorcas Good, the four-year-old daughter of Sarah Good was accused and thrown into jail; a four-year-old child who was barely old enough to make coherent sentences, was convicted of being a witch and "taking supernatural revenge on the possessed for taking away her parents." This is how paranoid the people of Salem had become. Everyone jumped at the mention of a witch. They were afraid that they would be the next people to become a possessed victim of their mysterious black magic. The villagers went from the four-year-old girl to seventy-one-year-old Rebecca Nurse followed by forty-seven-year-old Elizabeth Proctor. Both of these women who were from very wealthy, prosperous homes, were imprisoned because people thought Rebecca Nurse's mother and Proctor's grandmother practiced black magic when they were alive. At this point, anyone who was a family member of an accused witch was most likely to wind up in jail also. In addition, John Proctor became the first male to be charged for being a witch because he stood by his beli...
