Highlighter Stars.

You know what really annoys me?
Well, probably a lot of things, but a specific thing that annoys me at the moment is inconsistency.

I’m writing a presentation/essay plan about the Salem witch trials and late seventeenth century New England society. And I’ve found 3 different stories as to how the whole Salem witches thing started:

Scenario #1: Three girls were looking into a crystal ball, and saw the image of some ‘witches’ - three of which were people they knew, so they accused them of being witches
Scenario #2: Similar to the above, except that the girls were looking into the crystal ball in order to see their future husbands
Scenario #3: Two young girls started acting really strangely and when the doctor couldn’t diagnose them, he said that they had been bewitched, and the two girls blamed Tituba the black slave.

It’s not even as if I’ve found this conflicting information on Wikipedia or something - all 3 stories come from what should be reliable textbooks. How am I supposed to know which one is the real one? Does anyone know which is the actual truth, or is there so much speculation around the whole thing that no one can know for sure?

Luckily, I can get away with not actually putting how the events started, so it’s not as if my work could suffer through putting down the ‘wrong’ one. However, I would like to know, just for myself, you know? If the textbooks can’t agree, how can they expect us poor students to know what we should be learning?