TL;DR: Here we make the case that the tiny secret society, on which there has been much study and about which there has been much discussion, is simply another of the numerous projects of the Salem Witches.

The “Bonesmen” of Skull and Bones very quietly move pieces around the chessboard. It is, perhaps, the most elite of secret societies which are not quite secret. Don’t drone me, bro, but shouldn’t we ask, “Who moves the Bonesmen around the chessboard?”

You see, all the conspiracy theorizing about “The Brotherhood of Death” concerns their membership, their rituals, the symbology of “322”, and the various associations and doings the alumni. Well that’s neat and all—and this is nothing to dispense with any of that—but does it not strike closer to the heart of the matter to try to find out who created these people as Bonesmen in the first place? That’s what we’re here to do.

I’m often shocked at what They leave laying around, knowing how easily it could all have been vaporized. We aren’t quite that lucky here and part of our case will be circumstantial. Since the stakes are pretty high, I believe we should press forward with it. I think you may leave with a view something like, “Well, someone needs to prove this isn’t the correct conclusion, if that’s the case.”

We’re going to make two cases, in fact, one for each of the founders of Skull and Bones. We’ll make the second case in the style of somewhat lazy prosecutor, by raising suspicions and pointing out the associations of three different men, all named Russell. One was a co-founder of Skull and Bones, one was his ancestor, and one was a shady government dude hanging around the Salem Witch Trials.

Now, I get it, you can’t present this as evidence in court, but it would be pretty weird if what we were going to see was all mere happenstance. The first case is short and to the point, and thus somehow less satisfying. We set our scene nearly two centuries ago, in 1832, when Skull and Bones was founded….

One of the founders was Alphonso Taft (1810-1891). He was a member of the powerful Taft family. The connection to the Salem Witches is a gimme, because the mainstream considers it mere historical trivia. I think we realize this is not the case. Alphonso’s son was President William Howard Taft, and we are handed this:

Family Relationship of William Howard Taft (27th U.S. President) 6th Great-grandson to George Jacobs (Executed for Witchcraft, Salem 1692) (Famous Kin)

What do I always say about the Salem Witches being just outside the spotlight, eh? Yes, George Jacobs (Salem witch trials) was fake hanged for witchcraft, while his son, George Jr., was fake accused but fake got away. BTW, George Sr. was 83 when he fake died and who knows how long he lived, so please have some hesitancy before believing that line about how everyone used to die at 33 or whatever. Not true.

I also pause to note we found a US President just by-the-by. I did not recognize any of the surnames given in WHT’s lineage, so he’s way on the periphery. Given the way disinformation intended for conspiracy theory circles is constructed, the more familiar a name is as one of “Them”, the less important that person is. Not a rule but evidence of a function.

We now turn to the other founder of Skull and Bones, William Huntington Russell (1809-1885). I hope you are already aware that the society was founded and is based to this day at Yale University. We could almost stop there. Among the ten founders, we find: Andrew, Mather, Noyes, Pierpont, Russell, Webb, and Russell. Frickin-A, 70% Salem Witches from the jump! That is, assuming we finish the present case about the Russells.

Wiki begins with mention that William is “a descendant of several old New England families”. The only one I recognized was “Pierpont”. Actually, you’ll see the link wiki gives leads directly to James, and he was the Pierpont in the above list and leader of the Yale founders group. For context, “Pierpont” is the “P.” in J.P. Morgan. You see the kind of start we’re off to. Okay, now here is some sophisticated disinformation:

William's older cousin, Samuel Russell, founded the successful merchant trading firm Russell & Co. in 1823, but William was never associated with this firm.

Now why would they want to so explicitly dissociate William from Russell & Company? To throw us off a trail? Is this the trail?

By the late 1820’s, Russell & Company were the biggest supplier of Indian based trade Opium into China…. In the opening months of 1831, Russell & Company had successfully smuggled of 3,500 chests of Indian opium into China; equal to twenty percent of the total amount of opium imported into China in the whole of 1831 alone.

You could probably turn a few bucks doing that, huh? Before we move on, let me emphasize the point that these Salem Witches did not just operate in history books. In fact, they write history books. Here is additional sophisticated disinformation about Skull and Bones:

In a 1974 book [Yale: A History], Brooks Mather Kelley attributed the interest in Yale senior societies to the fact that underclassmen members of then freshman, sophomore, and junior class societies returned to campus the following years and could share information about society rituals, while graduating seniors were, with their knowledge of such, at least a step removed from campus life.

See, Skull & Bones and Scroll & Key are totally innocuous, right? I remind you that Cotton Mather was absolutely central in the Salem Witch Trials, eventually writing Wonders of the Invisible World, a defense of the trials. Everything old is new again.

Let’s move on to the Reverend Noadiah Russell (1659-1713). You can see this brings us to the era of the Salem Witch Trials themselves in 1692. The first note is that They subtly (yes, I give them credit for that) try to muddy the relationship between Noah and William. The terms they use are “progenitor” and “ancestor”.

The two are, in fact, g-g-grandfather and g-g-grandson, in a direct line: William Huntington <- Matthew Talcott <- Rev. Noadiah <- Rev. William H. <- Rev. Noadiah. No typos. I wanted to spell it out for what I think are obvious reasons.

If you wish, you can verify the relationship starting with William’s Geni page. Click on “Son of” a few times to get to Noah’s Geni page.

I would have told you to do that on WikiTree, but their genealogical links got crossed up, for what I think are obvious reasons. Anyway, it’s important to switch over to the elder Noah’s WikiTree page because it has important biographical information for him that Geni lacks.

First a quick side note off the main topic: I just finished a long series about the phony assassination of Abraham Lincoln. In fact, I just posted the final installment. The one right before that was:

On the hoaxed assassination of Abraham Lincoln: mainstream conspiracies, conspiratorial conspiracies, and Salem Witches (plus another Parker!) (7/29/2025).

Well imagine this coincidence: Noah married a woman born Mary Hamlin (1662 - 1743). I checked and, yes, she is a relative of Hannibal Hamlin. He was Abe’s Veep. She could be a lineal ancestor for all I know, but I haven’t confirmed that yet. Small World and Small Club.

On Noadiah’s WikiTree page, you might assume he was a Connecticut guy all his life, born in New Haven and died in Middletown. That a ways from Salem, well over a hundred miles as the crow flies. But, Noah went to Harvard in 1677 and then on to Ipswich in 1683, supposedly to teach. Well, you don’t even have to get on the freeway to get from Ipswich to Salem.

That brings us to the other side of this equation. On the list of people of the Salem witch trials, you’ll find a “James Russell” listed in one place only, under “Politicians, writers, and public figures”. Now, you might be asking why I didn’t provide you a link to the wiki page for James, and this is where it starts to get intriguing.

The link wiki gives is broken and only takes you to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Russell_(Massachusetts_colonist). Pretty specific page name, right? As in, written by a human at some point and not machine-generated. However, the page for James does not look like it ever existed to be later deleted, nor can I locate any archived version. Do not ask me what’s going on here, but you have to wonder why no historians or feminists or Wiccans ever seem to wonder what’s going on. James definitely existed, though, as documented in the:

Case files referencing James Russell (University of Virginia | Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project)

By the way, it’s very difficult to find anything on James using a search engine in the normal way. I had to use Yandex just to dig up a paper called “Gender Roles and the Salem Witch Trials: Women’s Newfound Power in Salem, 1692”. Turned out not to be helpful.

James is formally styled in the records as “Esq'r of their Majes'ts Councill & Province of the Massachusets Bay in New England & Justice of Peace within the Same”, whatever that means. The thing is, the entire government of the colony was flipped over and reorganized in 1692. Surprise. We’re not here to deconstruct that, but suffice to say that James was some sort of “eminence grise” in the witch trials, an assistant to the new Deputy Governor Thomas Danforth. Just outside the spotlight and right on brand.

Here’s the question: is James related to these other Russells? And here’s where I swing for the fences: I think he might be Noadiah’s brother.

You see, James is—as we encounter not infrequently—a ghost. He has no wiki page, no genealogy. What I wrote above is most of what is known about him. We’ll never match him up directly through documentation.

Let me pitch you this, though: Noadiah’s father was William Russell, of New Haven (1612-1664). He had four children in total: Samuel, Anna, John, and Noadiah. If you check the genealogy pages for the other children, Noadiah and .Anna’s are typical while those for Samuel and John are virtually empty and total dead ends. Sus, eh? Now, is it crazy to imagine that (drum roll) John simply walked away from his life, moved to the Salem area, and started going by “James”?

First, his age would be about right. John was born in 1653, which would make him about 40 at the time of the Salem Witch Trials. Noadiah arrived in Ipswich in 1683, so maybe John/James went with him. James would be over a hundred miles away from home, and hanging out in a town full of generational Satanists, so it doesn’t seem likely he would be casually outed. Everyone will have to decide for themselves, but this seems like nothing compared to today’s shenanigans.

How about a final push over the cliff to wrap this all up? William Russell of New Haven emigrated in 1638 from Over Compton in Dorset, UK. He had been preceded in 1635 by "Cornet" Joseph Parsons (1620-1683) of Beaminster, a town about 12 miles away.

Name sound familiar? “Cornet Joseph” was involved in fake witch trials decades before the exercise at Salem. He was also the progenitor—among many other examples—of the “Atomic Admiral” Deak Parsons, Vice President Levi Parsons Morton, and good old Jack Parsons. I mean, c’mon.

Thanks for reading!