What happened
In the winter of 1692 in Salem Village, Massachusetts Bay Colony, nine-year-old Betty Parris, the minister's daughter, and her cousin Abigail Williams began screaming, writhing in convulsions and hiding under furniture. A doctor declared it witchcraft. Pressed by adults, the girls named three women: the enslaved Tituba, the poor Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne, who rarely attended church. Tituba confessed to a pact with the Devil and spoke of other witches – and the avalanche began. A special court admitted “spectral evidence”: testimony that the spirit of the accused had tormented a witness in a dream or vision. Between June and September 1692, 19 people were hanged, including the respected elderly Rebecca Nurse. Giles Corey, in his eighties, who refused to enter a plea, was pressed to death with stones. At least five of the accused died in jail. When accusations began to reach the elite, Governor William Phips dissolved the court, and in 1693 the last prisoners were released.
Witnesses
The girls of Salem Village and their families, the judges (including Samuel Sewall, who publicly apologised for his role in 1697), ministers Samuel Parris and Increase and Cotton Mather; extensive court records survive.
Explanations and hypotheses
Historians point to a tangle of causes: conflicts between the village and the town, disputes over land and the minister, the Puritan belief in a real Devil and the trauma of wars with Native Americans. The popular theory of ergot poisoning (Linnda Caporael, 1976) is rejected by most scholars. As early as 1711 the colony partly rehabilitated the convicted and paid compensation; the last of them, Elizabeth Johnson Jr., was cleared only in 2022. In 2016 the execution site was identified – Proctor's Ledge, where a memorial was unveiled in 2017; an older memorial beside the cemetery in central Salem was dedicated by Elie Wiesel in 1992.
Explained The phenomenon has a widely accepted, down-to-earth explanation.
Sources
- Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project (University of Virginia)
- George Lincoln Burr (ed.), Narratives of the Witchcraft Cases, 1648–1706 (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1914)
- Brigit Katz, Last Convicted Salem 'Witch' Is Finally Cleared (Smithsonian Magazine, 2022)
More: Wikipedia (en)