TL;DR: The role of the Nichols family in the Salem Witch Trials has been obscured, and similarly their genealogy has been scrambled. Tracing it as far as we can leads to some strange revelations. The bonus will be evidence that “They” are reading these posts about “Them”. Spicy!

As deep as some of these trails lead us, I’m actually a person that like likes to keep things simple. A large part of this research—as bizarre as some of the material has turned out to be—is just trying to straighten out the information we’ve been handed in the public record. After I lay it out in the daylight, you may of course do with it as you please.

I had already located the Salem Witches at the Ludlow Massacre (which was fake and I was technically looking at another massacre at the same place and time that doesn’t even have a name, but that’s all for the next post), when I came across the names “Nichols” and “Martin”. I had previously touched only on Nichols and only circumstantially, but that brief contact had included some provocative associations.

“And here it is again,” I thought. “I need to get this straightened out and make a quick determination as to whether the Nichols family was or was not involved in the Salem Witch Trials.” Famous last words, at least in regards to the “quick” part. The incidental contact with “Nichols” came here:

Dr. Joseph P. Farrell: a disinformation agent with unlikely connections to the Montauk Project, DB Cooper, and the Salem Witch Trials (conspiracies.win 5/29/2025)

To save you the reading, (1) In genealogy records for the peerage, I found names similar to JPF’s in association with the names “Preston” and “Nichols”, (2) I speculated that’s where they came up with the fake name for the guy that handed us the Montauk Project fanfic, and (3) three of the six case agents for the NORJAK investigation of the DB Cooper/Salem Witch joint were named Carr, Farrell and Nichols.

That was as far as I went at the time, and I would readily admit it could all have been coincidental. Time to get off the fence! Right to the horse’s mouth on the Internet, the University of Virginia | Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project:

Case files referencing Thomas Nichols (“22 yeares”)

Case files referencing Lydia Nichols (“about 17”)

Case files referencing Elizabeth Nichols (“about 12”)

Each of those testimonial records is short and to the point. I mean, they’re utter bullshit accusations of witchery but it’s quite clear what phony claims they’re making. It further seems obvious these were the children of a man named Thomas Nichols Sr. (1635-1696) of Amesbury, Massachusetts. That’s less than twenty miles up I-95 from modern-day Danversport, known as Salem Village at the time of the trials.

Okay then, “answer = yes”, the Nichols family was directly involved in the Salem Witch Trials. Simple and straightforward, just like I like. And that’s where it all starts to spin out of control.

If you check Wikipedia’s list of people of the Salem witch trials, there are no Nichols listed. And as you’ll see in a moment, none of the Geni pages for any of these Nichols note their involvement in the Salem Witch Trials. I get that their involvement was minor but that’s not the issue.

I feel comfortable claiming that that anyone who reads those Wiki or Geni pages would subconsciously assume that if these people were involved in such an incredibly high-profile event, such participation would at least be noted. We have to ask the question: are all the “experts” that put such documents together just shitty at their jobs, or were these intentional omissions?

Let’s examine first the simplest case, that of Lydia Nichols. As you can see, that record is virtually empty. Being “about 17” in 1692, she would have been born around 1675. Geni lists her “Birthdate: estimated between 1651 and 1689”. Not untrue, but a horrible estimate.

Next least weird is the case of Thomas Nichols (1670-1724). That record looks fairly normal on the surface, with some questionable things said in the voluminous “About Thomas Nichols” section. I won’t question any of them except one: “Mother Mary Moulton1 b. c 1642”. Moulton? We know that name, don’t we?

Eye of newt and mutilated cow: Linda Moulton-Howe is descended from a witness at the (fake) Salem Witch Trials (conspiracies.win 11/21/2024)

Linda’s immediate genealogy is almost completely hidden, but I contended that it traced back to this participant in the Salem Witch Trials: Robert Moulton III (1644-1731). (FYI, I refer to him as “III” but these suffixes changed through an individual’s lifetime.) Interestingly, Robert Moulton isn’t on the wiki list either, just as with the Nichols, but his association with the trials is noted on his Geni page.

I found I could not with absolute certainty tie Linda to Robert. Nor can we make a lot of progress with the woman Geni records in a sparse record as Thomas’s mother: Mary Nichols (born circa 1642). It curiously notes: "Also Known As: Probably not Moulton". WTF? That’s like telling a cop, “I’m probably not the suspect.” There’s actually a lot about “Mary Moulton” in the text part of the page. Robert’s genealogy runs out in just one more generation so we won’t readily be able to search for a link to a “Mary”.

As the only candidate I would offer, you might want to consider whether his mother was this woman: Mary Friend (Moulton) (1644-1703). She was married in Salem and two of her daughters married Dodges, which is another Salem Witch Name I’ve never written up.

Also, note that her children were: Mary (1666), John (1668), James (1674), Sarah (1676), Esther (1678), Elizabeth (?). That leaves an odd gap during the time when Thomas was born in 1670. Just, uh… just saying.

What to make of any of this? Who knows, but it gets weirder with the other sibling Elizabeth, for whom the Geni record is: Ebenezar Tucker (Nichols) (1664-1735). She is aka “Elizabeth”, so this is her alright. Ebenezer is a guy’s name, though, and you’ll see “she herself” has a son named Ebenezer. Also, a 12-year-old in 1692 would have been born about 1680, so the given birth year of 1644 is way off. Who knows what’s going on with all this but I don’t think we quite have the truth.

It gets weirder from here but, okay, maybe at this point it sounds like a lot of hysteria about these three Nichols kids who were barely involved in the Salem Witch Trials. Therefore, I would like to stop and point out that there’s literally a historic landmark in Salem, built almost a century after the trials, named the Peirce–Nichols House (1782).

The Pierces are, I believe, incredibly important but I just haven’t gotten around to writing about them yet. You can see how painstaking all this is. As quick points of reference, though, remember that Barbara Bush was born Barbara Pierce, and that the founder of the Smithsonian was the bastard son of Hugh Percy. Spellings and pronunciations have altered greatly over the centuries but I trust you can get the feel of the variations.

While researching for the Joseph Farrell post, I came across a book that I didn’t include in that writeup because I thought it went too far out on a limb:

Witch's Breed: The Peirce-Nichols Family of Salem (Susan Farley Nichols Pulsifer 1967)

Captain Ichabod Nichols was born in 1749 at Salem, Massachusetts, the son of David and Hannah Gaskell Nichols. He was a descendant of Thomas Nichols, who was living at Amesbury, Massachusetts, by 1667, and of Sussanna Martin, who was executed for witchcraft in 1692.

It turns out I didn’t go too far out on a limb enough. The question stood: was the connection between Farrell and Nichols merely spurious? I was really reaching and I knew it. But did you notice the name of the author? Looks like Susan (like Martin, of all names) was a Nichols herself, had also descended from a family named Farley, and had married some dude named Pulsifer.

If you research the surname Farley, you find out:

The patronymic surname is an anglicised form... of the Irish patronym Ó Fearghail, which means "descendant of Fearghail"….

And as for the surname Farrell, you are told it is:

… an anglicised form of the Gaelic patronym Ó Fearghail.

They are variations of the same name. The author of that book on the Pierces and Nichols was herself a Nichols and a Farrell. Can you convince yourself this is all merely spurious? Me neither.

Now look back at that pull quote from the book: did you recall the name of the particular witch in question? Susannah Martin (née North) (1621-1692). She was the maternal grandmother of the wife of Thomas Nichols, Jane Nichols (Jameson) (1673-1721). And do you recall, way back at the beginning, the suspicious names I found at (near) the Ludlow Massacre? Nichols and Martin.

This isn’t the first time that particular witch has come up. In one of the most bizarre genealogical situations I’ve yet encountered, she had a family that was a weird analog for that of someone with whom you might be familiar:

There is a baffling mystical connection between the Salem Witch Trials and America’s sweetheart, John Cusack (conspiracies.win 11/22/2024)

All this adds up in my mind to the importance of the Nichols family being proportional to the lowness of their profile.

Bonus: Because I have to look for things that have been deliberately obscured, I’m used to being attuned to the smallest ripples on the surface of the water that might betray what is happening in the depths. We started here with my post which outed Joseph Farrell, which was on May 29, 2025.

You can read it to see that one of the big tells I identified was that he had supposedly spent decades as an academic studying Christianity, but that he hardly had anything to say about religion now that he was “a guy who writes weird books” (<- his own words, you can hear him say this incredibly unenthusiastically at the top of the following podcast). Less than a month later, what do we get?

#889: Hidden Civil War History & Attacks on the Orthodox Church w/ Joseph P. Farrell (Tin Foil Hat Podcast 6/26/2025)

Nine hundred episodes and he’s never been on the show before. When he is, it’s about how he’s all upset with these “deep state” attacks on Christianity. It’s basically Their only goal, don’t you know? Okay, Joe. The next day, we get:

Our cries have been heard!! (r/TinFoilHatPod 6/27/2025)

Whose cries are these? If you want this disinfo agent’s content, he’s got a weekly audio podcast, some kind of subscription video service, innumerable long-form interviews on YouTube, 41 or 42 books (he doesn’t know exactly, which you can hear at the top of the podcast), and all kinds of written content on his website.

Now, I’m a big fan of Sam Tripoli and no shade, but do you think fans of Joseph Farrell are also crying out for him to be interviewed by a dick-joke comic on his comedy/conspiracy podcast? Yeah, me neither, zero percent chance. If you look at that Reddit post, you can also try to believe it was ordinary fans of a dick-joke comic and his comedy/conspiracy podcast that downvoted the actual conspiracy I pointed out in a comment.

So are “They” are reading these posts? Well, They know who They are and this material is easy enough to find on a non-censored search engine. Why would They not monitor for such activity and take appropriate countermeasures? They’d be stupid not to and of all the claims I’ve made, none of them have ever been that They are stupid. Not as sophisticated as could possibly be, but not stupid. So… hi guise!

And to all, thanks for reading!