The Characters

Here are the characters

from Salem, the TV series !

- And that is the moment when you are asking us What took you so long ?! -

Season 1, Episode 1, The Vow

Season 1, Episode 2, The Stone Child

Cotton Mather in the series, is the main priest of the village. He lives in a rather small room, all by himself, and tries his best to understand the issue with the witches. He is determined but seems fragile, weak and submissive in a way, especially during the first season. There is shift at some point, where he becomes more confident, stronger, especially when he decides to stand up against his father, Increase Mather, who he fears more than anyone or anything else.

Cotton Mather really existed, and truly believed in witchcraft. He wrote Memorable Providences in which he presented all the things he had found out about the witches. In the TV series, the viewers actually see him writing all his conclusions in a notebook, we can imagine that it is a reference to the writing of this particular book. Except from the fact that he was really into finding witches and a true believer in God, there is no other detail that can be found about his temper, however, Cotton in the series shares the same feature, that is to say, he strongly believes the existence of those evil creatures, so much so that he almost seems paranoid – which was certainly the case in real life since he believed in them – but the more the story goes on, the more people believe him and the more he is right about the witches.

Season 1, Episode 10, The House of Pain

Now, let's talk about his lovely father. Increase Mather, in real life, was born on June 12th, 1639 and died on August 23rd, 1723. After being the first President of Harvard College, he became a judge and had a lot of doubts about the witch trials in Salem. He believed in evil possession and apparitions as written in his Essay for the Recording of Illustrious Providence, published in 1684.

Season 1, Episode 1, The Vow

Season 1, Episode 1, The Vow

She is the very-main character of this series and yet, she never existed. Mark my words: Mary Sibley NE-VER existed. However, Mary Walcott did and she is the one that took part of the witch trials.

Mary Walcott was Ann Putnam, Sr. niece and Ann Putnam, Jr cousin. She was one of the main accusers in the trials. She is not just any character, added so the writers and producers could create a story around her. She was crucial in the history of the witch hunt and so she is in the tv series.

She is portrayed as a strong, fearless protagonist whom the viewers like to see the evolution throughout the series. Indeed, in the first episode of season 1, she is just a poor unmarried girl, pregnant from her lover who has to go to war. When she heard about her lover's death, John Alden, she married George Sibley, the town mayor and became Mary Sibley. When we say “became”, we mean it. She transformed and shifted into a brand new character – besides from being a witch -, who rules over Salem. She is now rich and powerful. She became independent and embodies just rightly this independence that women at that time, and for many centuries, yearned for. We will come back on that point on the next article.

Season 1, Episode 1, The Vow

Season 1, Episode 2, The Stone Child

Season 1, Episode 4, Survivors

Mary is powerful, strong, fearless and fierce; but as many characters, she has weaknesses, her main one being John Alden. But who is he ? John is the main male character in the series and him, as well, existed. He was a sea Captain and a merchant, and was accused on May 28th, 1692 but escaped from jail and fled to New York with other people who had been accused of witchcraft. It is believed that he had connections with the Indians of Maine. In the series, he is played by Shane West. He is represented as a handsome and strong man who has to leave Salem to go to war. He is Mary's lover and the father of her son. He comes back to Salem 7 years later, when everyone thought he was dead. Throughout the first season, he has absolutely no idea about Mary's activity and is strongly reluctant to believe in witches. He is this down-to-earth and sarcastic character, common to every supernatural story. However, in the second season, when he had fled to New York but was “adopted” by an Indian tribe, he became another person. He believes in magic, in witches and has one goal: to put down Mary, his former love of his life.

As we mentioned it before, he is played by Shane West, aka the hottie. And the question that we are all asking ourselves is, WHY? Well, the answer is easy to guess. We are in a case of a TV series that needs to entertain the viewers; a TV series about witches in a historical background. The aimed audience is certainly young heterosexual women or young homosexual men. As a producer, how do you attract such an audience ? How do you make them watch your show? You hire a handsome actor.

Season 2, Episode 7, The Beckoning Fair One

One of the characters that the viewers see very often in the series is Tituba. In the series, she is Mary Sibley's maid as well as her closest ally and the one who helped her turn into a witch. She is thus portrayed as a powerful woman but at the same time, her status of a servant makes her look weak, until season 2. In real life, Tituba was Indian and not a Black slave, as one could believe when watching the series. She was captured as a child and worked for Samuel Parris. She married an Indian called John in 1689, who happen to have the same name as Mary's lover. Tituba may have had only one child named Violet. She was accused of witchcraft “when shortly after Parris's daughter, Betty, began having strange fits and symptoms, she participated in the preparation of a "witchcake" (a mixture of rye and Betty's urine, cooked and fed to a dog, in the belief that the dog would then reveal the identity of Betty's afflictor)” as our main source points out. Afterwards, Tituba got beaten so as to confess and finally did so. 

Season 1, Episode 1, The Vow

Season 1, Episode 12, Ashes, Ashes

Season 2, Episode 3, From Within

Season 2, Episode 7, The Beckoning Fair One

Mercy Lewis was born in Falmouth, Maine in 1675 and was an orphan. She lost both of her parents during Indian attacks. She first lived with Reverend George Burroughs and worked for his family before residing with the family of Thomas Putnam. Mercy was one of the main accusers, just as Mary Walcott, during the 1692 witchcraft trials in Salem. And the writers of the series wanted to put their finger on that point – pun intended. Indeed, Mercy, played by Elise Eberle, is first a very innocent girl who finds herself diagnosed of being possessed by the Devil. Then, she is used as a witchcraft detector, that is to say, she has the ability to know who is a witch and who is not, by pointing her finger at them. 

In the first season, Mercy has 3 states: first, the innocent child, then the mad and hysterical possessed girl, and finally, the burnt creature. She shifts from a human to a monster.

In the second season, when the viewers had started to forget about her, she reappeared more stunning than ever, at the mercy – not intended, we swear – of the very powerful Countess, who she believes to be the one to be able to give her the revenge that she had been yearning for.

Season 1, Episode 2, The Stone Child

In history, Bridget Bishop was the first person to be executed (by hanging) during the Salem witchcraft trials, so we could say without offending anyone that she was the first victim of the paranoia that had emerged in Salem at that time. In the series, she is hanged as well. The viewers only see her in the beginning of season 1, when she helps a girl deliver a child. Once again, you could wonder what the link between witchcraft and... that is. Well, when giving birth, the mother saw a monstrous figure instead of Bridget for a very brief moment; in other words, she had an hallucination (that was provoked by Mary Sibley herself!) but that was enough for the Court in Salem to call her a witch and ultimately, execute her. She is one of the few characters that the viewers cannot help but feel pity for her (even if she is quickly forgotten) because she is portrayed as a young woman, innocent from the very beginning. She did not do anything at all, she was never a witch and the viewers know that which make them feel bad for her. The worst part of the story is that she REALLY existed and she has REALLY been hanged on the crime of witchcraft.

Season 1, Episode 1, The Vow

Now, THE family Hale. 

What an interesting family.

John Hale, Ann Hale's father, was best known as Reverend John Hale. He was born on June, 3rd 1636 in Charlestown, Massachusetts and died on May, 15th 1700. He had a crucial role in the trials and had a lot of influence. He wrote A Modest Enquiry Into the Nature of Witchcraft, it was published in Boston in 1697.

In the series, he is one of the men who lead the trials, he is trusted by everyone and has power over people. The twist in his character is the fact that... he is himself a witch! Or we should say, a wizard.

In season 2, his daughter, furious after discovering that she was a witch and that her family had been hiding this secret from her for so long, kills both of her parents (what goes around, comes around...). She then becomes both an ally and an enemy to Mary Sibley.

But of course, as we mentioned it before, this TV series borrows real facts and mixed them with an unrealistic world. Thus, many characters were invented. What is interesting to see, is the reason why they were added to the story and what their role contribute to it.

Season 1, Episode 1, The Vow

Season 1, Episode 2, The Stone Child

That is the case of Isaac, the Fornicator - with a capital F. Isaac Walton is one of the residents in Salem and his job is to get rid of the waste of the town. He is a lower-class inhabitant and a friend to everyone. In the pilot, he is portrayed as a sinner and presented as such to the viewers, and yet, he is one of most charismatic, genuine and friendly characters in the show. And despite of the biased representation that has been given to him in the first scenes of the show, he is a character that triggers the action in many ways. In a word, he is this character that looks useless and secondary but has in fact a key role to the story.

Many details were added to each character, changing them partially or completely, which proves that Salem, the TV series, has not been created to be accurate historically speaking but only to give the viewers some details about a certain period in history that they may have heard before. But this series is not a documentary, entertaining a modern audience is the main goal as it is for many other TV series.