Wonders of the Invisible World and the Salem witchcraft crisis

Record summary

Cotton Mather’s Wonders of the Invisible World (1693), together with court records and pamphlets about the Salem prosecutions, is a major early North American source for claims of spectral attacks, invisible agents and bewitched spaces. It matters for comparison because later haunting narratives often borrow its vocabulary of testimony, affliction and community crisis. The material is a polemical religious and legal archive, not independent evidence of paranormal events. Surviving accounts vary sharply in reliability, and modern historians dispute how to interpret the afflicted witnesses and judicial process.