Salem witch trials

• 1. Introduction

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  The Salem witch trials of colonial Massachusetts sent nineteen people to the gallows in 1692. Fourteen of them were women and five were men. One more man died under torture after refusing to enter a plea. At least five others died in the disease-ridden jails without any trial at all.

  The proceedings ran from February 1692 to May 1693, and more than 200 people were accused. Thirty were found guilty. The first accusations came from Salem Village, known today as Danvers, but arrests soon spread to towns such as Andover and Topsfield. Around 151 of the accused can be traced to twenty-five different New England communities. The homes of many others are now unknown.

  No other witch hunt in colonial North America killed so many. Across the entire 17th century, only fourteen other women and two men were executed for witchcraft in Massachusetts and Connecticut.

  This documentary asks how a divided village parish produced a catastrophe on that scale. It asks who the accusers and the accused were, and why a court would convict on testimony that only one person claimed to see. Finally, it asks how long it took the colony, and later the state, to admit that the verdicts were wrong.

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• 2. A Quarrelsome Village

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  In 1672 the villagers of Salem Village voted to hire a minister of their own, separate from the church in Salem Town. That decision began a run of troubled pastorates. James Bayley served from 1673 to 1679, and George Burroughs from 1680 to 1683. Both left after the congregation failed to pay their full rate, even though the General Court upheld their rights. Deodat Lawson served from 1684 to 1688 and departed when the church in Salem refused to ordain him. Burroughs would later be hanged as a witch.

  Neighbors called the village "quarrelsome", and the record supports them. People fought over property lines, grazing rights and church privileges. Relations with Salem Town were strained as well.

  On the 18th of June 1689 the villagers agreed to hire Samuel Parris at £66 a year. One third was to be paid in money and two thirds in provisions, with the use of the parsonage. On the 10th of October 1689 they voted him the deed to the parsonage and two acres of land. That vote contradicted a village resolution of 1681 forbidding the transfer of ministry property to any individual. Parris made matters worse by delaying his acceptance. Once settled, he hunted for "iniquitous behavior" and made church members in good standing do public penance for small lapses. Historian Marion Starkey suggests that serious conflict may have been inevitable in such an atmosphere.

  The 1629 Royal Charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony was vacated in 1684, and King James II installed Sir Edmund Andros as governor of the Dominion of New England. Andros was ousted in 1689 after the Glorious Revolution replaced the Catholic James II with the Protestant co-rulers William and Mary. Simon Bradstreet and Thomas Danforth resumed their posts as governor and deputy governor. Without the old charter, however, they lacked constitutional authority to rule.

  War added to the strain. King William's War pitted English settlers in the present-day coast of Maine against the French-supported Wabanaki people. It came only 13 years after the devastating King Philip's War. In October 1690 Sir William Phips led an unsuccessful attack on French-held Quebec. Between 1689 and 1692, attacks on English settlements along the Maine coast led to the abandonment of some of them. A flood of refugees poured into areas like Essex County.

  Increase Mather spent four years working to obtain a new charter, and Phips often joined him in London. Final approval came in England on the 16th of October 1691. A copy reached Boston on the 8th of February 1692. Phips arrived on the 14th of May and was sworn in as governor two days later, together with Lieutenant Governor William Stoughton. On the 27th of May 1692 the new governor and council ordered a Special Court of Oyer and Terminer to deal with the prisoners "thronging" the jails. Those prisoners owed their cells to events in the minister's own household, months earlier.

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• 3. Puritan Beliefs

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  King Charles I was hostile to the Puritan outlook, and Anglican church officials tried to suppress it during the 1620s and 1630s. Puritans objected to the Book of Common Prayer, to clergy vestments, to the sign of the cross at baptism, and to kneeling for communion. They considered all of these popery. Many eventually crossed the Atlantic, mostly in families, and the Massachusetts Bay Colony became the largest and most economically important of their settlements. Colonial leaders were elected by freemen, men whose religious experiences had been formally examined before admission to a Puritan congregation. Those leaders regularly consulted local ministers.

  In the early 1640s England erupted in civil war. The Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell replaced the Crown in 1653, and its failure led to the restoration of the old order under Charles II. Puritan immigration to New England slowed significantly. In Massachusetts, a successful merchant class emerged that was less religiously motivated than the first settlers.

  In 1668 the English clergyman Joseph Glanvill published Against Modern Sadducism, claiming he could prove that witches and ghosts existed. He argued that doubting apparitions meant denying angels and, in the end, God himself. Works by Glanvill and Cotton Mather tried to show that "demons were alive".

  The earliest recorded witchcraft execution in New England was that of Alse Young in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1647. It began the Connecticut Witch Trials, which lasted until 1663. In the early 1680s, Elizabeth Morse of Newbury, Massachusetts, was found guilty after seventeen witnesses testified, and she was placed under house arrest.

  In 1689 Cotton Mather, a minister of Boston's North Church, published Memorable Providences Relating to Witchcrafts and Possessions. The book described the children of the Boston mason John Goodwin. Their eldest had stolen linen from the washerwoman Goody Glover, who was of Irish Catholic descent and whom her own husband called a witch. Four of the six Goodwin children then fell into fits that some called "the disease of astonishment". They suffered neck and back pains, tongues pulled from their throats, and loud outcries. Some flapped their arms like birds or tried to harm themselves and others. These same symptoms would fuel the craze of 1692.

  About 78 percent of the people accused and convicted of witchcraft were women. Puritans held that men and women were equal in the eyes of God but not in the eyes of the Devil. Women's souls were seen as unprotected inside "weak and vulnerable bodies". Historian Elizabeth Reis argues that some women who confessed truly believed they had given in to the Devil, at least temporarily. Others may have confessed to save their lives, since confessors were reintegrated into society.

  Quarrels with neighbors often set accusations in motion. Abigail Faulkner, accused in 1692, admitted she was "angry at what folk said" and that the Devil might have briefly overtaken her. Women who were unmarried or childless were more likely to be targeted. Faulkner herself was pregnant when she was convicted, and that fact would delay her sentence.

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• 4. The Afflicted and Accused

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  In February 1692, nine-year-old Betty Parris and her eleven-year-old cousin Abigail Williams began to suffer fits in Salem Village. They were the daughter and niece of the Reverend Samuel Parris. John Hale, minister of nearby Beverly, called the fits "beyond the power of epileptic fits or natural disease to effect". Deodat Lawson, the former village minister, gave an eyewitness account. The girls screamed, threw things about the room, crawled under furniture and twisted themselves into strange positions.

  The girls complained of being pinched and pricked with pins. A doctor, historically assumed to be William Griggs, found no physical sign of illness. Ann Putnam Jr., aged 12, and Elizabeth Hubbard, aged 17, joined in the accusations, and other young women in the village behaved the same way. When Lawson preached as a guest in the meetinghouse, the outbursts of the afflicted interrupted him several times.

  The cause of these symptoms is still debated. Researchers have proposed convulsive ergotism, caused by rye bread made from grain infected with the fungus Claviceps purpurea, from which LSD is derived. That theory was first offered 284 years later. Others have suggested bird-borne encephalitis lethargica, sleep paralysis to explain nocturnal attacks, or hysteria in response to Indian attacks. Some modern historians prefer motives such as jealousy, spite and a need for attention.

  A church record entry by Parris, dated the 27th of March 1692, describes an episode involving rye. Mary Sibley, a church member and close neighbor, directed John Indian, a man enslaved by Parris, to make a witch cake. According to an account attributed to Lawson, the cake was made from rye meal and urine from the afflicted girls and was fed to a dog. Parris scolded the congregation for "going to the Devil for help against the Devil". Lawson's account places the baking around the 8th of March, which does not square with Parris's version. The first complaints went out on the 29th of February, and the first arrests followed on the 1st of March.

  Tradition holds that Tituba, enslaved in the Parris household, entertained the girls with fortune telling. In this telling they used egg white and a mirror as a crude crystal ball, and one girl saw the shape of a coffin. The 19th-century writer Charles W. Upham popularized the story. It traces to John Hale's book, but there only one girl confessed to trying such a trick once. Hale neither named Tituba nor dated the incident. Tituba's pretrial examination, however, records an energetic confession. She spoke of "creatures who inhabit the invisible world" and claimed that many other people in the colony were part of the devil's plot against the Bay. Contemporary sources call her only an "Indian". Researcher Elaine Breslaw suggests she may have been captured in what is now Venezuela, brought to Barbados, and possibly Arawak. Governor Thomas Hutchinson later called her a "Spanish Indian".

  Tituba, Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne were the first three people accused and arrested. Good was a destitute woman with a poor reputation. Osborne rarely attended church, and neighbors disapproved of her remarriage to an indentured servant and her efforts to control her son's inheritance from an earlier marriage. Tituba stood apart from the other villagers by her ethnicity. All three were outcasts, and they were left to defend themselves. Questioning began on the 1st of March 1692 and lasted several days before they were jailed. Some historians suspect that Ann Putnam Jr.'s accusations reflected a bitter feud between the Putnam and Porter families, which had deeply polarized the town.

  In March the net widened to Martha Corey, Rebecca Nurse, the child Dorothy Good and Rachel Clinton of Ipswich. Corey had voiced doubts about the girls, which drew attention to her. Corey and Nurse were both full covenanted church members, and that frightened the community. If such upright people could be witches, then church membership offered no protection. Dorothy Good was only four years old, and the magistrates construed her answers as a confession implicating her mother. Clinton was arrested at the end of March on separate charges unrelated to the girls. Examiners searched the accused for moles and birthmarks, which were believed to show where the Devil drank blood.

  In April, Sarah Cloyce, Nurse's sister, and Elizabeth Proctor were examined by John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin in Salem Town. John Proctor protested on his wife's behalf and was arrested that same day. Within a week, Giles Corey, Bridget Bishop, Mary Warren, Abigail Hobbs and Deliverance Hobbs were also examined. Abigail Hobbs, Warren and Deliverance Hobbs confessed and named further accomplices. On the 30th of April, the arrests reached the Reverend George Burroughs. Sarah Osborne died in jail on the 10th of May 1692. By the time the special court was ready to sit, 62 people were in custody.

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• 5. Courts and Verdicts

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  The Court of Oyer and Terminer convened in Salem Town on the 2nd of June 1692. William Stoughton, the new Lieutenant Governor, presided as Chief Magistrate. Thomas Newton served as the Crown's attorney and Stephen Sewall as clerk. Bridget Bishop's case came first. Witnesses said she dressed in black and odd costumes, against Puritan custom, and she was questioned about a coat that had been torn in two ways. The jury convicted her the same day, and she was hanged on the 10th of June.

  The court then adjourned for 20 days to seek advice from New England's leading ministers. Their reply, dated the 15th of June and written by Cotton Mather, urged "a very critical and exquisite caution" about spectral testimony. Yet it also recommended the "speedy and vigorous prosecution" of the guilty. Thomas Hutchinson judged that the first two and the last sections "took away the force of all the others". When Mather later reprinted the letter in Magnalia, he left those sections out. Major Nathaniel Saltonstall resigned from the court around the 16th of June. The historian Upham credited him as the only public man of his day with the courage to condemn the proceedings at the start.

  On the 19th of July, Sarah Good, Elizabeth Howe, Susannah Martin, Sarah Wildes and Rebecca Nurse were hanged. In mid-July the constable of Andover invited the afflicted girls to visit his wife and identify the cause of her suffering. Ann Foster, her daughter Mary Lacey Sr. and her granddaughter Mary Lacey Jr. then all confessed to witchcraft.

  On the 19th of August, Martha Carrier, John Willard, George Burroughs, George Jacobs Sr. and John Proctor were executed. An eyewitness described Burroughs riding in a cart through the streets of Salem. From the ladder he made a speech protesting his innocence and recited the Lord's Prayer flawlessly, something witches were thought unable to do. Many in the crowd wept. Cotton Mather, mounted on a horse, reminded the people that Burroughs was not an ordained minister. The executions then continued. Burroughs was dragged to a shallow grave between rocks, with a hand, his chin and a foot left uncovered. Elizabeth Proctor was convicted too, but her pregnancy won her a temporary stay.

  On the 19th of September, Giles Corey, an 81-year-old farmer from Salem Farms, refused to plead at his trial. The judges applied an archaic punishment called peine forte et dure, piling stones on his chest until he could no longer breathe. After two days he died without entering a plea. His refusal is usually explained as a way to protect his estate from the Crown. Historian Chadwick Hansen disagrees, noting that much of Corey's property was already seized and that he had written a will in prison. Hansen called the death "a protest … against the methods of the court". The critic Robert Calef wrote that Corey knew the same witnesses would speak against him and "rather chose to undergo what Death they would put him to."

  On the 22nd of September, eight more people were hanged: Mary Eastey, Martha Corey, Ann Pudeator, Samuel Wardwell, Mary Parker, Alice Parker, Wilmot Redd and Margaret Scott. The Reverend Nicholas Noyes looked at the bodies and said, "what a sad thing it is to see Eight Firebrands of Hell hanging there." Dorcas Hoar was reprieved so that she could confess. Mary Bradbury, aged 77, escaped with help from family and friends. Because Rebecca Nurse and Martha Corey had been excommunicated, they were denied proper burials. Oral history says families retrieved the bodies after dark and buried them in unmarked graves on their own land. The record books of the time do not mention these deaths.

  Governor Phips returned from the fighting in Maine in early October. He later wrote that he had stopped the court's proceedings once he understood the danger of relying on the word of the afflicted alone. On the 29th of October, Judge Samuel Sewall recorded that the Governor said the Court of Oyer and Terminer "must fall". Phips's own wife, Lady Mary Phips, had been among those "called out upon" around this time. After his order there were no more executions.

  In January 1693 a new Superior Court of Judicature convened in Salem, again led by Chief Justice Stoughton. Unlike its predecessor, it did not allow spectral evidence. The first five defendants, Sarah Buckley, Margaret Jacobs, Rebecca Jacobs, Mary Whittredge and Job Tookey, were found not guilty. Of sixteen more people tried, three were convicted: Elizabeth Johnson Jr., Sarah Wardwell and Mary Post. When Stoughton signed warrants for their execution, Phips issued pardons. In Charlestown, five more defendants were acquitted but stayed jailed until they paid their jail fees. Lydia Dustin died in jail on the 10th of March 1693. In April, Captain John Alden was cleared by proclamation, and a servant girl, Mary Watkins, faced charges for falsely accusing her mistress. In May, at Ipswich, Susannah Post, Eunice Frye, Mary Bridges Jr., Mary Barker and William Barker Jr. were all acquitted, ending the trials. Yet the convictions of those already condemned remained on the books.

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• 6. Evidence From Invisible Worlds

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  The legal path began when someone blamed a loss, illness or death on witchcraft and filed a complaint with local magistrates. If they found it credible, they ordered an arrest and a public examination, which was in effect an interrogation meant to extract a confession. Cases that satisfied the local magistrates went on to a superior court. In 1692 the magistrates chose to wait for the new charter and governor. At that level, witnesses appeared before a grand jury. A person could be indicted for afflicting others through witchcraft, or for making an unlawful covenant with the Devil. Trial could follow quickly, sometimes on the same day.

  Much of the evidence, though not all, was spectral. The afflicted claimed to see the apparition or shape of the person who was tormenting them. A theological dispute grew around whether the Devil needed a person's permission to use that person's shape. The court held that he did. A sighting of a specific person's apparition therefore counted as proof of complicity with the Devil. Opponents countered that the Devil could take anyone's shape.

  The magistrates found a precedent in A Tryal of Witches, about the 1662 Bury St Edmunds case. There the jurist Sir Matthew Hale had allowed spectral evidence against two Lowestoft women. The philosopher and physician Thomas Browne had supported its use. The colonial magistrates reasoned that if such authorities accepted it, they could too.

  The ministers' letter urging that no one be convicted on spectral evidence alone was printed in Increase Mather's Cases of Conscience. The court eventually ruled spectral evidence inadmissible. Convictions fell dramatically, which may have hastened the end of the trials. Calef noted that those who confessed escaped trial altogether, as happened to Tituba and the child Dorothy Good.

  In September 1692, examiners at Andover used a touch test. If an afflicted person in the middle of a fit calmed down when the accused touched them, observers concluded that the accused was the cause. Parris had explicitly warned his congregation against such examinations. Accused women later recalled being blindfolded and led by the hand to touch the afflicted, who declared themselves well and named their tormentors. John Hale explained the theory: the witch's glance sent a "Malefick Venome" into the victim, and touch drew it back by sympathy.

  Other evidence included confessions and testimony from confessed witches who named others. Searchers looked for poppets, books of palmistry and horoscopes, and pots of ointment in the homes of the accused. They also looked for "witch's teats", moles or blemishes insensitive to touch, whose discovery was treated as de facto proof of witchcraft.

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• 7. Doubt and Apology

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  Several ministers traveled to Salem to watch the trials and gather accounts. Deodat Lawson published A Brief and True Narrative in the middle of the proceedings, offering evidence meant to convict the accused. In early June 1692, the Boston Baptist minister William Milbourne petitioned the General Assembly against the court's use of spectral evidence. He had to post a £200 bond or be arrested for "contriving, writing and publishing the said scandalous Papers".

  Cotton Mather's Wonders of the Invisible World was printed in October 1692, with a letter of endorsement from Stoughton. Mather had conceived it as a triumph for the trials and his own leadership. As suspicion of spectral evidence grew, he rewrote it and disclaimed personal involvement. It reported five trials, much of it copied from court records that Stephen Sewall supplied. His father, Increase Mather, published Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits in November 1692. It acknowledged the growing doubts but defended his son's account. Thomas Brattle answered with an openly sarcastic open letter ridiculing the superstitions of Salem.

  Samuel Willard of Boston's Third Church had once supported the trials. He grew alarmed as the Mathers crushed dissent, and he published an anonymous dialogue between two characters, S for Salem and B for Boston. The title page named Philip English and John Alden as authors and Philadelphia as the printing place, but scholars believe it was secretly printed in Boston. B warns that whatever comes from the afflicted and the confessors "is to be suspected".

  From 1693 to 1697 the Boston cloth merchant Robert Calef collected letters, court records and petitions. He set them beside passages of Mather's book under the title More Wonders of the Invisible World. No Boston printer would take it, and it was published in London in 1700. Later historians relied on his documents. John Hale finished A Modest Enquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft in 1697, though it appeared in 1702 after his death. He admitted that "we walked in the clouds, and could not see our way."

  In 1695 the Quaker Thomas Maule published a book arguing that it was better for a hundred witches to live than for one innocent person to die. He was imprisoned for twelve months before a jury found him not guilty. On the 14th of January 1697, a fast day set by the General Court, Samuel Sewall had Samuel Willard read his apology aloud at Boston's South Church. Thomas Fiske and eleven other jurors also asked forgiveness. In 1702 the General Court declared the trials unlawful, and several accusers admitted they had fabricated their charges.

  Petitions between 1700 and 1703 demanded that the convictions be reversed, since those convicted were legally dead and open to fresh accusations. The General Court first reversed the attainder only for three people who had petitioned: Abigail Faulkner Sr., Elizabeth Proctor and Sarah Wardwell. On the 14th of February 1703, the Salem Village church voted to reverse Martha Corey's excommunication. On the 25th of August 1706, Ann Putnam Jr. joined that church and publicly asked forgiveness, saying Satan had deluded her into accusing innocent people, Rebecca Nurse among them. In May 1709-22 people who had been convicted or had convicted relatives demanded reversal and compensation. On the 17th of October 1711 the General Court reversed the judgments against those 22. Governor Joseph Dudley authorized £578 12s in compensation on the 17th of December 1711. Philip English's claims were not settled until 1718. On the 6th of March 1712, Nicholas Noyes and the Salem church reversed his excommunications of Rebecca Nurse and Giles Corey.

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• 8. Memory and Memorials

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  In 1885 the descendants of Rebecca Nurse erected an obelisk-shaped granite memorial on the grounds of the Nurse Homestead in Danvers, carrying an inscription from John Greenleaf Whittier. In 1892 a second monument honored forty neighbors who had signed a petition supporting her.

  Not everyone was cleared in the early 18th century. In 1957 descendants of six executed people, omitted from the reversals of 1711 and 1712, demanded that the General Court clear their ancestors. The resulting act declared the accused innocent, but it named only Ann Pudeator. Bridget Bishop, Susannah Martin, Alice Parker, Wilmot Redd and Margaret Scott appeared only as "certain other persons".

  The 300th anniversary in 1992 brought events across Salem and Danvers. Salem dedicated a memorial park with a stone slab bench set into the wall for each person executed in 1692. Speakers in August included playwright Arthur Miller and Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel. Danvers built its own memorial and reburied bones unearthed in the 1950s, assumed to be those of George Jacobs Sr., at the Rebecca Nurse Homestead.

  The Danvers Tercentennial Committee also persuaded the Massachusetts House to pass a resolution honoring the dead. After long efforts by Paula Keene, a Salem schoolteacher, and state representatives J. Michael Ruane and Paul Tirone, a bill added every name not yet listed. Governor Jane Swift signed it on the 31st of October 2001. Every named victim was finally proclaimed innocent, except Elizabeth Johnson Jr., who was cleared by the Massachusetts Senate on the 26th of May 2022. Schoolchildren who discovered the omission had pressed for it, and hers was the last conviction reversed.

  In America, Salem has served as a cautionary tale about isolation, religious extremism, false accusations and lapses in due process. Historian George Lincoln Burr wrote that "the Salem witchcraft was the rock on which the New England theocracy shattered." John Neal's 1828 novel Rachel Dyer was the earliest influential work of popular fiction drawn from the episode. Many later retellings took liberties, including the false idea that American witches were burned.

  Land in Salem was bought by the city in 1936 and renamed "Witch Memorial Land", but no memorial was built, and many still believed the hangings took place on the summit of Gallows Hill. Rebecca Eames of Boxford, brought to Salem for questioning, said she was held in "the house below the hill" from which she could see people attending executions. That helped rule out the summit. In January 2016 the University of Virginia's Gallows Hill Project announced its findings. Using old maps, GIS technology and ground-penetrating radar, the team identified Proctor's Ledge at the base of the hill as the execution site. The city dedicated the Proctor's Ledge Memorial to the victims there in 2017.

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