History · 1692–1693

The Salem Witch Trials

How fear, faith and local quarrels led to the best-known witch hunt of colonial America, and how the colony came to regret it.

Overview

Between February 1692 and May 1693 more than 200 people in and around Salem Village, in the English colony of Massachusetts Bay, were accused of witchcraft. Nineteen were hanged, fourteen women and five men. One man was pressed to death with heavy stones, and at least five people died in gaol. Today the trials are remembered as a warning about mass fear and injustice.

How it began

In January 1692 nine-year-old Betty Parris and her cousin Abigail Williams, eleven, began to have violent fits in the house of the village minister, Samuel Parris. A doctor found no natural cause and suggested witchcraft. Pressed to say who tormented them, the girls named three women: Tituba, an enslaved woman in the Parris household, Sarah Good, who begged from door to door, and Sarah Osborne, who was old and ill. All three stood at the edge of the village community.

Tituba confessed, and she spoke of other witches. More girls and young women fell into fits, and the accusations spread within weeks to respected church members and to neighbouring towns.

The trials

In May 1692 Governor William Phips set up a special court, the Court of Oyer and Terminer. It met in the port of Salem Town. The court accepted spectral evidence: testimony that the shape of the accused had appeared to a victim and pinched, choked or threatened her. Only the victim could see the shape, so nobody could disprove it.

• Bridget Bishop was the first to be hanged, on 10 June 1692.
• Rebecca Nurse, seventy-one and respected by all, was first acquitted. The judges sent the jury out again, and she was hanged in July.
• Giles Corey, over eighty, refused to answer the charge. He was pressed under stones to force a plea and died on 19 September.
• The last eight were hanged on 22 September 1692.

Those who confessed were kept alive, to name others. Those who insisted on their innocence were condemned. It was the reverse of most European trials, and it meant that every one of the dead had refused to lie.

The end of the trials

Doubt grew over the summer, above all about spectral evidence. In October 1692 the Boston minister Increase Mather wrote that it would be better for ten suspected witches to escape than for one innocent person to be condemned. Even the governor's own wife, it was later said, had been named. Phips stopped the special court. A new court in 1693 refused spectral evidence and acquitted nearly everyone, and in May the governor released those who were still in prison.

Regret

The colony came to see what it had done, sooner than any European state. In January 1697 it held a day of fasting for the tragedy. On that day the judge Samuel Sewall had a statement read in church in which he took the blame and the shame upon himself, and twelve jurors signed an apology. In 1711 the colony reversed many of the convictions and paid compensation to the families. Massachusetts cleared further names in 1957 and 2001, and the last, Elizabeth Johnson Jr., in 2022.

Why it happened

Historians name several causes that came together. The Puritans of New England believed firmly in a devil who was at work among them. Salem Village was split by old quarrels over land and over its minister. A war with the French and their Native American allies was being fought on the frontier in Maine, and several of the afflicted girls were refugees from it who had seen their families killed. The colony had just lost its old charter, and its courts stood on uncertain ground.

One explanation often heard, that the girls were poisoned by a fungus in the rye, has not convinced most historians.

Why it matters today

None of the people executed at Salem was a witch in any sense of the word. Most were ordinary churchgoers. The town of Salem lives from the name today, and modern witches have settled and opened shops there. That is a later story. The trials themselves are remembered for the victims, and as a lesson in what happens when a court accepts fear as evidence.