The Salem Witch Trials

In the winter of 1692, in the small farming community of Salem Village, Massachusetts, two children began to behave in ways no one could explain. Betty Parris, aged nine, and her eleven-year-old cousin Abigail Williams threw themselves about, screamed, contorted their bodies and complained of being pinched and pricked by something unseen. Betty's father was the village minister, the Reverend Samuel Parris — a stern Puritan who preached often about the Devil at work in the world. When the local doctor could find no illness, he reached for the explanation his community already believed in: the girls, he suggested, were bewitched.

It is worth remembering how real this danger felt. To Salem's Puritans, the Devil was not a story but a living enemy who recruited human servants — witches — to do his work. The colony was uneasy in other ways too: there had been frontier warfare, smallpox, harsh winters and bitter quarrels between families. Fear was already in the air. So when the adults pressed the suffering girls to say who was tormenting them, the girls began to name names.

Among the first accused was Tituba, an enslaved woman in the Parris household. Under intense questioning she gave a long, dramatic confession, describing the Devil and hinting that other witches were at work in the village whom she could not name. That confession was the spark. If a confessed witch said there were others, then the hunt could not stop at one.

Through the spring of 1692 the accusations multiplied with terrifying speed. Neighbour accused neighbour; old grudges over land, money and pride found a deadly new outlet. To meet the flood of cases, the new governor, William Phips, created a special court — the Court of Oyer and Terminer ("to hear and to decide") — led by stern judges who were sure that witchcraft was loose in Salem.

The court's fatal flaw was the kind of proof it allowed. It accepted spectral evidence: the claim that the accused person's spirit, or "shape," had appeared to a victim and tormented them. By its very nature, no one else could see this shape — so a witness could simply say that a defendant's spirit had attacked them, and there was no way to disprove it. A cruel logic took hold. Those who confessed and named others were spared; those who professed their innocence were far more likely to be condemned. Honesty became the most dangerous choice of all.

Roughly two hundred people were accused. The first to be executed was Bridget Bishop, a sharp-tongued tavern-keeper whose independence had long made neighbours uneasy. Here it is worth clearing up the most stubborn myth about Salem. The condemned were not burned at the stake — that is a confusion with witch trials elsewhere in Europe. In Salem, nineteen people were hanged. One more, the elderly farmer Giles Corey, refused to enter any plea at all; the court tried to force one out of him by piling heavy stones on his body, and after three days he died beneath them. Several others, never even brought to trial, died in the colony's foul, crowded jails.

By the autumn of 1692, doubt was finally catching up with fear. Respected ministers, among them Increase Mather, argued openly that spectral evidence was far too dangerous to hang anyone on — for the Devil, they warned, might take the shape of an innocent person. When accusations began reaching toward more powerful families, and even, it was said, the governor's own wife, Phips lost his nerve for the whole business. He forbade the court to accept spectral evidence, dissolved it, and a new court soon set the remaining prisoners free. By May 1693 the trials were over.

What followed was a long, uneasy reckoning. The colony had hanged nineteen of its own and crushed a twentieth, on evidence it now knew to be worthless. In 1697 one of the judges, Samuel Sewall, stood in his Boston church and let his apology be read aloud before the congregation. Years later, in 1706, Ann Putnam — one of the original accusers, a child during the panic — publicly recanted, saying she had been deceived and asking forgiveness of the families she had helped to ruin. The colony reversed convictions and, much later, paid compensation; Massachusetts did not formally clear all the names until the twentieth century.

Salem was not the largest witch hunt in history, nor the deadliest. But it has never loosened its grip on us, because of what it shows so clearly: how quickly fear, belief and old resentment can combine, how a court can be captured by panic, and how hard it is — once the accusations are flying — for anyone to simply say stop. Ever since, "a witch hunt" has been our shorthand for exactly that.