He entered in a flurry of activity, carrying large books and projecting an air of great knowledge. Hale was the driving force behind the witch trials, probing for confessions and encouraging people to testify. He is so merciless and bent on discovering witchcraft, that he practically tortured Parris's slave Tituba into confessing. Hale questions everyone who was mentioned by the accusers, even those not actually accused. His mind was already made up that Salem was plagued with witchcraft, even without concrete evidence to support his allegation. Hale used such inadequate verification as the deaths of Mrs. Putnam's first seven children, and the reading of strange books preventing Giles from praying, to prove the presence of the Devil. After interviewing the Proctor's, John reveals something to Hale that drastically changed the way he looked at the trials.
While on his witch hunt, Reverend Hale stopped at the Proctor house because Elizabeth had been mentioned in one of the testimonies. After thoroughly questioning the couple on their poor church attendance and the Ten Commandments, John pulled him aside in order to proclaim the falseness of the entire investigation. John explained to Hale that Abigail Williams, the girl mainly responsible for starting the fiasco, had told him that there was absolutely no witchcraft in Salem. Hale denounced Proctor's notion as nonsense, since he himself had conducted the investigations. John followed by declaring that "There are them that will swear to anything before they"ll hang; have you ever thought of that?" indicating that the girls were desperate to keep suspicion away from the fact that they were caught dancing around a fire at night. With this startling new evidence, Hale began to realize that all of the convictions and executions of "witches" were horribly wrong, and that he had been manipulated and deceived throughout his entire investigation.