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Portrait of The Salem witch trials

History · Early modern

The Salem witch trials

1692–93

A witch panic in colonial Massachusetts

Fits suffered by two girls in a Massachusetts parsonage in early 1692 grew into the largest witch panic in American history. A special court accepted 'spectral evidence' — testimony about visions — and within a year nineteen people had been hanged and one pressed to death, before the colony's ministers and governor lost their nerve and the machinery was dismantled.

How to spot them

  • ▸1692: a New England village panic that ends with nineteen hangings and a pressing
  • ▸Quiz clue: 'Tituba', 'spectral evidence', 'Oyer and Terminer', 'Gallows Hill', 'More weight'
  • ▸The accusers are mostly girls and young women; so, in the end, are most of the accused
  • ▸The episode Arthur Miller used as an allegory for McCarthyism

What happened

Two girls in a village parsonage falling into fits in the winter of 1692

Betty Parris, nine, and her cousin Abigail Williams, eleven, in the household of the Reverend Samuel Parris

An enslaved woman in the minister's house confessing to a devil's book

Tituba, whose vivid confession turned a local trouble into a hunt for a conspiracy

A special court of Oyer and Terminer convened by Governor Phips, admitting visions as evidence (1692)

Spectral evidence: testimony that the accused's shape had tormented the witness

Nineteen hanged on a rocky ledge below Gallows Hill

Proctor's Ledge, confirmed as the execution site by researchers in 2016; Bridget Bishop was the first, on 10 June 1692

An eighty-year-old farmer pressed under stones, saying only 'More weight' (19 September 1692)

Giles Corey, who refused to plead so that his estate could not be forfeited

'It were better that ten suspected witches should escape than that one innocent person should be condemned'

Increase Mather's Cases of Conscience (1692), which helped end the use of spectral evidence

A judge standing in silence in Boston's Old South Church while his apology is read out (1697)

Samuel Sewall, the only one of the judges to repent publicly

Quick-fire facts

  • •The trouble began in Salem Village, a farming parish now the separate town of Danvers, Massachusetts
  • •Nineteen people were hanged, Giles Corey was pressed to death, and several more died in jail — about 25 deaths in all
  • •The first executed was Bridget Bishop, on 10 June 1692; the last hangings were on 22 September 1692
  • •More than 150 people were accused and imprisoned across Essex County
  • •Governor William Phips created the Court of Oyer and Terminer in May 1692 and dissolved it that October, after his own wife was named
  • •Its replacement, the Superior Court of Judicature, barred spectral evidence and acquitted almost everyone brought before it
  • •Rebecca Nurse, a pious 71-year-old, was acquitted, then condemned when the jury was sent back out
  • •No treaty ended it; the reckoning came instead through Sewall's public apology in 1697, a 1702 declaration that the trials were unlawful, and a 1711 Act reversing the attainders and paying restitution
  • •The last of the convicted were formally exonerated only in 1957, 2001 and — in the case of Elizabeth Johnson Jr — 2022
  • •Arthur Miller's The Crucible (1953) made the episode a byword for moral panic and political witch-hunting

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Sources