Salem Witch Trials (1692): Accusations, Trials and Executions

The Salem witch trials were a series of witchcraft accusations, prosecutions and executions in the Province of Massachusetts Bay between February 1692 and May 1693. Beginning with the strange afflictions of two girls in Salem Village, the panic led to more than 150 arrests, roughly 200 people accused, and the execution of 20 men and women. It remains the most notorious witch hunt in American history and a lasting symbol of how fear, faith and flawed justice can combine.

Background

Massachusetts in 1692 was a colony under strain. The Puritan settlers of the Massachusetts Bay Colony had lost their original charter in 1684, and after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 they were governed provisionally while they waited for a new one. Legal authority was uncertain until the new governor arrived in May 1692.

The northern frontier was at war. King William’s War with France and its Wabanaki allies had brought raids on settlements in Maine and New Hampshire, and refugees from those attacks had moved south, some to Essex County. The memory of King Philip’s War in 1675–1676 was still fresh.

Salem Village, a farming community on the edge of the prosperous port of Salem Town, was itself divided. Villagers had quarrelled for years over their church, their boundaries and their ties to the town. In 1689 they had appointed a contentious minister, Samuel Parris, a former merchant whose salary and firewood became the subject of bitter disputes.

Belief in witchcraft was nearly universal. Most English and European people of the time believed the Devil could recruit humans to harm their neighbours, and English law made witchcraft a capital felony. Witch trials had taken place in New England before, including in Connecticut in the 1660s, though on a much smaller scale.

How the panic began and spread

The first accusations

In January and February 1692, Betty Parris, the minister’s nine-year-old daughter, and her cousin Abigail Williams, aged eleven, began to suffer fits. They contorted their bodies, cried out and complained of being pinched and pricked. A local doctor, usually identified as William Griggs, suggested they were under an “evil hand”, meaning witchcraft.

Pressed to name their tormentors, the girls accused three women. Tituba was an enslaved woman in the Parris household, probably of Native American origin from the Caribbean. Sarah Good was a poor woman who begged from door to door, and Sarah Osborne was an elderly woman who rarely attended church. Warrants were issued on 29 February 1692 and the three were examined at the village meeting house on 1 March.

Good and Osborne denied everything. Tituba, however, confessed, describing a tall man from Boston, a book signed in blood and other witches in the area. Her confession, perhaps given under pressure, convinced many listeners that a real conspiracy of witches was at work.

Widening circles

Other young women and girls began to show the same afflictions, among them Ann Putnam Jr., Mercy Lewis, Mary Walcott, Elizabeth Hubbard and Mary Warren. Adults also made accusations, and the circle of suspects widened quickly.

The accused were no longer only marginal figures. In March, Martha Corey and Rebecca Nurse, respected church members, were arrested. By April even a former Salem Village minister, George Burroughs, then living in Maine, had been named as the ringleader. Accusations reached Andover, Topsfield, Ipswich, Boston and many other towns.

Confession became a way to survive. Those who confessed and named others were generally not tried in 1692, while those who insisted on their innocence faced trial. This pattern encouraged more confessions and more names.

The trials and executions

The Court of Oyer and Terminer

In May 1692 Sir William Phips arrived as royal governor under the new charter, finding the jails full. On 27 May he established a special Court of Oyer and Terminer, a term meaning “to hear and determine”, to deal with the backlog. Lieutenant Governor William Stoughton presided.

The court accepted spectral evidence: testimony that the accused person’s spirit had appeared to the witness and tormented them. Judges also relied on confessions, physical “witch’s marks” found during body searches, and reports of past quarrels followed by misfortune. Accused people had no defence lawyers.

The first person tried, Bridget Bishop, was convicted and hanged on 10 June 1692. Five women were hanged on 19 July, including Rebecca Nurse, whom a jury had first acquitted before the judges asked it to reconsider. On 19 August five more were hanged, among them George Burroughs, John Proctor, George Jacobs Sr. and Martha Carrier. Burroughs recited the Lord’s Prayer on the gallows without error, something believed impossible for a witch, which unsettled the crowd.

Giles Corey, an elderly farmer, refused to enter a plea. Under English law he was subjected to “peine forte et dure”, being pressed under heavy stones, and died on 19 September 1692 after two days. Three days later, on 22 September, eight more people were hanged, including his wife Martha Corey and Rebecca Nurse’s sister Mary Eastey.

Doubt and the end of the trials

Criticism grew through the late summer. Ministers had warned from the start that spectral evidence was unreliable, since the Devil could take the shape of an innocent person. In October 1692 Increase Mather, president of Harvard College, published Cases of Conscience, arguing that it was better for ten suspected witches to escape than for one innocent person to be condemned.

Accusations had also begun to reach prominent people, reportedly including the governor’s own wife. On 29 October 1692 Phips dissolved the Court of Oyer and Terminer. A new Superior Court of Judicature heard the remaining cases from January 1693 and excluded spectral evidence. Most defendants were acquitted; the few convicted were reprieved. In May 1693 Phips ordered the release of those still held, once they had paid their jail fees.

By the numbers

Key people

• Samuel Parris, minister of Salem Village, in whose household the afflictions began. He left the village in the later 1690s after years of conflict.
• Tituba, enslaved in the Parris household, whose confession fuelled the panic. She was eventually released and her later life is unknown.
• William Stoughton, chief judge of the special court, who strongly defended spectral evidence and never publicly expressed regret.
• Sir William Phips, the royal governor who created the court and later stopped it.
• Increase Mather and Cotton Mather, father and son ministers. Increase criticised spectral evidence; Cotton was more supportive of the court and defended it in his book Wonders of the Invisible World.

Why historians think it happened

No single cause explains Salem, and historians weigh several factors together. Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, in Salem Possessed (1974), mapped the accusations onto long-running feuds in Salem Village. They argued that families tied to the village’s traditional farming economy tended to accuse those linked to the more commercial Salem Town.

Mary Beth Norton, in In the Devil’s Snare (2002), stressed the frontier wars. Several accusers and accused had connections to the violence in Maine, and fears of the Devil merged with fears of attacks by the Wabanaki and the French. The weakness of colonial government during the charter crisis made the panic harder to contain.

Other historians have emphasised gender, since about three-quarters of the accused were women, many of them older, widowed or in disputes over property. A theory proposed in 1976 that the afflictions were caused by ergot, a fungus found in rye, attracted wide attention but is rejected by most historians. The symptoms and timing do not fit well, and the accusations followed social patterns rather than diet.

Myths and facts

• Myth: The accused were burned at the stake. Fact: All those executed were hanged, except Giles Corey, who was pressed to death.
• Myth: It all happened in today’s city of Salem. Fact: The outbreak began in Salem Village, now Danvers, and spread to many towns; the trials were held in Salem Town.
• Myth: The victims were practising witches. Fact: There is no credible evidence that any of the executed practised witchcraft; most were church members who maintained their innocence.

Aftermath, apology and legacy

Regret came within a few years. On 14 January 1697 Massachusetts held a day of fasting and prayer for the tragedy. That day Judge Samuel Sewall had his minister read a public statement in which he took “the blame and shame” for his part. Twelve jurors also signed an apology. In 1706 Ann Putnam Jr., one of the chief accusers, made a public confession of her errors in the Salem Village church.

In 1711 the colony reversed the attainders, the legal penalties, of many of those convicted and paid compensation to their families. A 1957 resolution and a 2001 law cleared the remaining executed victims by name. Elizabeth Johnson Jr., convicted in 1693 but not executed, was formally exonerated in 2022 after a campaign by schoolchildren.

The execution site, Proctor’s Ledge, was identified by researchers in 2016 and is now marked by a memorial. A separate memorial was dedicated in Salem in 1992, on the 300th anniversary.

Salem became shorthand for injustice driven by mass fear. Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible (1953) used the trials as an allegory for anti-communist investigations in the United States, and “witch hunt” entered everyday political language. Salem has since become a major tourist destination built around the events. Like earlier European cases such as the Pendle witch trials, it is now studied as a warning about evidence that cannot be tested.

Timeline

• 1692, January–February: Betty Parris and Abigail Williams begin suffering fits in Salem Village.
• 1692, 29 February: Warrants are issued for Tituba, Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne.
• 1692, 27 May: Governor Phips creates the Court of Oyer and Terminer.
• 1692, 10 June: Bridget Bishop becomes the first person hanged.
• 1692, 19 August: Five people are hanged, including George Burroughs and John Proctor.
• 1692, 19 September: Giles Corey is pressed to death.
• 1692, 22 September: Eight people are hanged, the last executions.
• 1692, 29 October: Phips dissolves the special court.
• 1693, May: Phips orders the release of the remaining prisoners.
• 1711, October: Massachusetts reverses many convictions and grants compensation.

Why it matters

The Salem witch trials showed how quickly a community could turn on its own members when fear, faith and uncertain authority met. The rejection of spectral evidence and the public apologies that followed made Salem an early lesson in the need for due process and the danger of accusations that cannot be disproved.