In a village where everyone believed that the devil was real, close at hand, and acted in the real world, the suspected affliction of the girls became an obsession. The first three to be accused of witchcraft were Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborne. Tituba was an obvious choice, due to the fact that she was Parris" slave, Good was a beggar and social misfit who lived wherever someone would house her, and Osborn was old, quarrelsome, and had not attended church for over a year. .
The Putnams brought their complaint against the three women to county magistrates Jonathan Corwin and John Hathorne. At the examinations, the girls described attacks by the specters of the three women, and fell into their contortions when in the presence of one of the suspects. Other villagers came forward to offer stories of cheese and butter mysteriously gone bad or animals born with deformities after visits by one of the suspects. The magistrates, in the common practice of the time, asked the same questions of each suspect over and over: Were they witches? Had the seen the Devil? How, if they are not witches, did they explain the contortions seemingly caused by their presence? The style and form of the questions indicates that the magistrates thought the women guilty. .
The matter might have ended with admonishments were it not for Tituba. After first adamantly denying any guilt, afraid perhaps of being made a scapegoat, Tituba claimed that she was approached by a tall man from Boston--obviously the Devil--who sometimes appeared as a dog or a hog and who asked her to sign in his book and to do his work. Yes, Tituba declared, she was a witch, and moreover she and four other witches, including Good and Osborn, had flown through the air on their poles. She had tried to run to Reverend Parris for counsel, she said, but the Devil had blocked her path. Tituba's confession succeeded in transforming her from a possible scapegoat to a central figure in the expanding prosecutions.