History Cont.
After a while, many girls in the village were becoming ill. Samuel Parris believed this unnatural behavior to be an illness. Parris called on a physician to explain what was causing this illness but he could not come to a medical conclusion. The physician explained that the girls must be bewitched. Without a medical explanation to this illness, people started to turn to the Puritan church for answers. Parris explained to his congregation that God was angry at them for violating the communal nature of their religion and was sending forces to destroy their village (4). It was under the Puritan notion of spectral evidence that Parris could do this. Spectral evidence is evidence that can be interpreted differently by different people.