Interesting History

Salem Witch Trials: How Mass Hysteria and Fear Executed 20 People in Colonial America

In the winter of 1692, in the rigid, God-fearing Puritan settlement of Salem Village (now Danvers, Massachusetts), two young girls began to scream. Betty Parris, age nine, and her cousin Abigail Williams, age eleven, the daughter and niece of the local minister Reverend Samuel Parris, convulsed, contorted their bodies into impossible positions, and claimed to feel invisible hands pinching and biting them. They babbled incoherently, dashed furniture about, and crawled under tables making sounds that terrified the adults who witnessed it. The village doctor, William Griggs, could find no physical cause. His diagnosis was as simple as it was catastrophic: the girls were bewitched. Within weeks, the nightmare that would become known as the Salem Witch Trials had consumed an entire community, leading to the arrest of over two hundred people, the conviction of thirty, and the execution of twenty — nineteen by hanging, and one by being crushed to death under stones. It remains the deadliest witch hunt in American history and one of the most terrifying examples of what happens when fear, religion, and the machinery of justice combine into a weapon of mass destruction.

The Salem Witch Trials were not a single event but a cascading catastrophe — a chain reaction of accusation, confession, and condemnation that fed on itself with increasing ferocity over the course of nine months. The Puritans of Salem Village lived in a world where the Devil was as real as the soil beneath their feet, where every misfortune — a failed crop, a sick child, a dead cow — could be interpreted as evidence of supernatural malevolence. The village was riven by internal divisions: land disputes between wealthy merchants and struggling farmers, power struggles between rival congregations, and the ever-present anxiety of life on the edge of a wilderness that the Puritans believed was literally inhabited by demonic forces. When the girls began to exhibit their terrifying symptoms, the community did not ask why. They asked who. And once they started asking, they could not stop.

The initial accusations came from a small group of young women, most of them between the ages of eleven and twenty. After Betty Parris and Abigail Williams, the most prominent accuser was Ann Putnam Jr., a twelve-year-old girl from one of the village’s most powerful families. She was joined by Mercy Lewis, Mary Walcott, and Elizabeth Hubbard. The girls’ symptoms — convulsions, visions, claims of being bitten and pinched by invisible specters — were treated not as illness but as evidence. Under pressure from the magistrates, the girls named names. And the names they named told a story about Salem that the community did not want to hear about itself.

The first three people accused of witchcraft were Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborne — the most marginalized, vulnerable members of the community. Tituba was an enslaved woman of Caribbean or African origin in Reverend Parris’s household. Sarah Good was a poor beggar who wandered the village asking for shelter and food. Sarah Osborne was an elderly woman who had scandalized the community by marrying her servant and attempting to seize her sons’ inheritance. These were not random targets. They were the people that Puritan society had already decided were suspect — the poor, the outsider, the nonconformist. Tituba, under intense interrogation and almost certainly the threat of physical violence, confessed to witchcraft and named other women in the village as her co-conspirators. Her confession — vivid, detailed, and almost certainly coerced — provided the template for every accusation that followed.

In May 1692, Massachusetts Governor Sir William Phips established a special court: the Court of Oyer and Terminer. The court was presided over by Chief Justice William Stoughton, a man who was absolutely convinced of the reality of witchcraft and the guilt of the accused. Under Stoughton’s direction, the court operated with terrifying efficiency. The most controversial legal doctrine was spectral evidence — the practice of allowing witnesses to testify that the specter or spirit of an accused person had appeared to them in dreams, visions, or waking hallucinations to torment, pinch, bite, or choke them. Under this doctrine, a girl who dreamed that Rebecca Nurse’s ghost was strangling her could testify to that dream in open court, and the dream itself was treated as evidence that Nurse was a witch. The problem was obvious even at the time: spectral evidence was, by definition, impossible to verify or refute. Without it, most of the convictions would have been impossible.

The executions began on June 10, 1692, with the hanging of Bridget Bishop, a tavern owner in her early sixties known for her independent spirit and flamboyant clothing. On July 19, five more women were hanged: Sarah Good, Elizabeth Howe, Susannah Martin, Rebecca Nurse, and Sarah Wildes. Sarah Good went to her death with a curse on her lips, telling Reverend Nicholas Noyes: “I am no more a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take away my life, God will give you blood to drink.” Rebecca Nurse was a 71-year-old grandmother of such piety that even some of her accusers doubted her guilt — her conviction so shocked the community that it began to turn opinion against the trials. On August 19, six more were executed, including George Burroughs, a former minister who recited the Lord’s Prayer perfectly on the gallows — a feat widely believed to be impossible for a witch. The crowd was momentarily stunned, but Cotton Mather, the influential Puritan minister, addressed the crowd, reminding them that the Devil could sometimes allow a witch to appear pious. Burroughs was hanged.

The most gruesome execution was not a hanging at all. Giles Corey, an 81-year-old farmer accused of witchcraft along with his wife Martha, refused to enter a plea — either guilty or not guilty. He was subjected to the ancient English punishment of peine forte et dure: his body was laid on the ground, a board was placed across his chest, and stones were piled on top, one by one, over the course of two days. If Corey pleaded, his property would be confiscated by the government; if he refused, his estate would pass to his heirs. According to multiple accounts, Corey’s last words to his torturers were simply: “More weight.” He died on September 19, 1692, his tongue pressed out of his mouth by the weight of the stones. His wife Martha was hanged three days later.

On September 22, 1692, the last group of condemned prisoners was hanged: Martha Corey, Mary Easty, Alice Parker, Mary Parker, Ann Pudeator, Wilmot Redd, Margaret Scott, and Samuel Wardwell. Mary Easty’s letter to the court before her execution — a dignified plea not for her own life but for the lives of others — has been called one of the most moving documents in American legal history. By this point, the hysteria had begun to exhaust itself. Too many people had been accused. Too many prominent citizens had been named. The accusations had begun to reach into the highest levels of Massachusetts society — including, reportedly, the governor’s own wife, Lady Mary Phips.

The turning point came in October 1692, when Governor Phips, alarmed by the growing outcry, dissolved the Court of Oyer and Terminer and established a new Superior Court that explicitly rejected spectral evidence. Without the ability to introduce dreams and visions as proof of witchcraft, convictions dropped dramatically. By May 1693, Phips had pardoned all remaining accused witches and released them from prison. The crisis was over. But the damage was staggering: over 200 people accused, 30 convicted, 20 executed, families destroyed, property confiscated, children orphaned, and a community permanently scarred.

The apologies came slowly — staggeringly slowly — over the course of three centuries. In 1697, Judge Samuel Sewall stood in the Old South Church in Boston while his public apology was read aloud. In 1706, Ann Putnam Jr. — one of the most aggressive accusers, who had named sixty-two people — stood before her congregation and publicly apologized, saying she believed she had been “instrumental” in the shedding of innocent blood. The Massachusetts colonial legislature passed legislative reversals of attainder in 1711 and 1722. But it was not until 1957 — 265 years after the trials — that the Commonwealth of Massachusetts formally apologized and exonerated some of the victims. Additional victims were not formally exonerated until 2001. The last name was cleared in 2022, when Governor Charlie Baker formally pardoned Elizabeth Johnson Jr., a woman convicted of witchcraft in 1693 whose name had somehow been missed by every previous act of exoneration. Three hundred and thirty years to clear every name.

The Salem Witch Trials did not end in 1693. They were reborn every time a community turned on its own members in a panic, every time a government used fear to justify injustice, every time an accusation was treated as proof and a denial was treated as guilt. In 1953, the playwright Arthur Miller recognized this when he wrote The Crucible, using the Salem trials as a direct allegory for the anti-Communist hearings of Senator Joseph McCarthy. “We are what we always were in Salem,” Miller wrote, “but now we are everywhere.” The metaphor has been applied to the Red Scares, the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, and the social media outrage cycles of the twenty-first century. Salem was not caused by moldy bread, or by the Devil, or by a single malevolent judge. It was caused by the same thing that causes every witch hunt: fear, amplified by authority, directed against the vulnerable, and justified by belief. Today, a memorial stands in Salem — stone benches inscribed with the names of the dead and the dates they were killed. The inscription reads: “Here were hanged the innocent.” It is the simplest epitaph for the most complex crime in American colonial history.