In the winter of 1692, a handful of young girls in a small Massachusetts village began screaming, throwing things, and twisting their bodies into strange positions. The local doctor could find no physical cause. Within weeks, three women stood accused of witchcraft. Within months, twenty people were dead.
The Salem witch trials are one of the most famous episodes in American history — and one of the most misunderstood. No one in Salem was burned at the stake. Nineteen people were hanged, one man was pressed to death under heavy stones, and at least five more died in jail. More than 200 people were accused before the panic finally ended in the spring of 1693.
What really happened in Salem? Who were the accusers and the accused, and why did an entire community turn on its own neighbors? The answers involve fear, politics, religion, property disputes, and a legal system that accepted evidence no modern court would touch.
Salem in 1692: A Town on Edge
To understand Salem, you have to understand the world its people lived in. Salem Village — today the town of Danvers, Massachusetts — was a farming community of a few hundred people, separate from the wealthier port town of Salem Town nearby. Life was hard and governed by strict Puritan religion.
The colony of Massachusetts Bay was in political turmoil: its original charter had been revoked, and it was waiting for a new royal charter from England. At the same time, the colony was fighting a brutal war with the Wabanaki and other Indigenous peoples on the northern frontier, and families fleeing the fighting arrived in Essex County with stories of raids and killings.
Salem Village itself was divided. Families argued over land, over who should be the village minister, and over the growing wealth gap between the port town and the farming village. The newest minister, Samuel Parris, arrived in 1689 to a congregation split over his salary and his authority. These tensions did not cause the witch trials on their own, but they created a community already suspicious and divided.
There was also a deep belief in witchcraft itself. In the 1600s, educated people across Europe and colonial America accepted that the Devil was real and that he worked through human agents called witches. Witchcraft was a capital crime under Massachusetts law, and ministers, judges, and magistrates believed in it too.
The Fits Begin: Betty Parris and Abigail Williams
The crisis began in January 1692 in the household of Reverend Samuel Parris. His nine-year-old daughter Betty and his eleven-year-old niece Abigail Williams began having fits — screaming, throwing things, uttering strange sounds, and twisting themselves into odd positions. Soon a twelve-year-old neighbor, Ann Putnam Jr., began experiencing similar episodes.
The local physician, William Griggs, could find no natural cause for their suffering. He concluded that the girls were bewitched. That diagnosis turned a medical mystery into a criminal hunt.
Historians still debate what the girls were actually experiencing. Some suggest they were acting out, encouraged by the attention and by the games they had been playing — the girls had reportedly been dabbling in fortune-telling with the help of Tituba, an enslaved woman in the Parris household, who entertained them with stories. Others point to the intense pressure of Puritan life on children, where boredom, fear, and strict discipline could produce strange behavior. There is no single answer that satisfies every historian.
Once the adults in Salem Village accepted the bewitchment explanation, the question became not whether witches were at work, but who the witches were.
The First Accusations: Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborne
On February 29, 1692, under pressure from the magistrates John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin, the girls named three women as their tormentors: Tituba, an enslaved woman from the Caribbean in the Parris household; Sarah Good, a homeless beggar; and Sarah Osborne, an elderly, impoverished woman. All three were outsiders — poor, low in status, or foreign-born — and easy targets for a frightened village.
The three women were arrested and interrogated starting on March 1. Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne insisted they were innocent. Tituba did something different: she confessed. She told the magistrates that the Devil had come to her and asked her to serve him, and she described vivid images of black dogs, red cats, and a tall man with white hair who wanted her to sign his book.
Tituba’s confession was a turning point. Before it, the village had three accused women and a frightening mystery. After it, the village had confirmation — from a self-described witch — that a conspiracy existed, and that more witches were hiding in Salem. Her testimony named others, and the hunt spread.
The accusations began to reach people no one had expected. Martha Corey, a loyal and respected member of the church, was accused — and her arrest shocked the village, because if a woman as devout as Martha Corey could be a witch, then anyone could. Rebecca Nurse, an elderly woman known for her piety, was accused too.
The Court of Oyer and Terminer and Spectral Evidence
As the accusations multiplied and the jails filled, Governor William Phips intervened. On May 27, 1692, he ordered the creation of a special Court of Oyer and Terminer — Latin for “to hear and to decide” — to try the accused. The court was led by Lieutenant Governor William Stoughton, and it consisted of seven judges. The accused had no lawyers.
The court’s most fateful decision was to admit what was called spectral evidence: testimony that the accusers had seen and been attacked by the specters — the invisible spirits — of the accused, whose shapes the Devil had supposedly borrowed. During the trials, the accusing girls would writhe and cry out in the courtroom, claiming that the specter of the person on trial was tormenting them at that very moment.
By modern standards, spectral evidence is no evidence at all: it is a claim about something no one else can see, offered by the very people making the accusation. But in 1692, many educated people accepted that the Devil could use a person’s shape, and the court treated the girls’ performances as proof. Denying the charge only made things worse, because the court treated a refusal to confess as stubbornness.
Those who confessed and named other witches were usually spared, because Puritan belief held that a confessed witch would face God’s punishment. Those who insisted on their innocence met harsher fates — a cruel logic that punished honesty and rewarded false confession.
The Hangings: June to September 1692
The first trial began on June 2, 1692. The defendant was Bridget Bishop, an older woman who had been accused of witchcraft more than a decade earlier and found innocent. This time she was convicted, and on June 10 she became the first person hanged on what would become known as Gallows Hill.
On July 19, five more people were hanged, including Sarah Good — who told the court she was no more a witch than the judge was a wizard — and Rebecca Nurse, whose conviction had horrified many in the village. Also hanged were Susannah Martin, Elizabeth How, and Sarah Wildes.
On August 19, five more were hanged, including George Burroughs, who had served as the minister of Salem Village from 1680 to 1683. Burroughs had moved to Maine, but he was brought back to Salem, accused of being the ringleader of the witches, and convicted. Before his execution he recited the Lord’s Prayer perfectly on the scaffold — something witches were believed to be unable to do — and the crowd reportedly hesitated. Cotton Mather, the influential Boston minister, was present and spoke to the crowd, and the execution went ahead. Also hanged that day were Martha Carrier, George Jacobs Sr., John Proctor Sr., and John Willard.
The final hangings came on September 22, when eight more people were executed, including Martha Corey and Mary Esty, the sister of Rebecca Nurse.
Giles Corey and the Victims Who Died Without Trial
The twentieth person to die was Giles Corey, an 81-year-old farmer and the husband of Martha Corey. When Giles was accused of witchcraft, he refused to enter a plea — neither guilty nor not guilty. Under English law, a trial could not proceed without a plea, and the court’s response was a medieval procedure called peine forte et dure, or “strong and hard punishment.”
Corey was laid on the ground, a board was placed on his chest, and heavy stones were piled on top. Over two days he was pressed beneath the stones. According to tradition, his only words were “more weight.” He died on September 19, 1692, crushed to death rather than submit to a trial he believed was illegitimate. His refusal also had a practical purpose: by dying without a conviction, he prevented the state from seizing his property, which would have left his family destitute.
At least five other accused people died in the disease-ridden jails without ever facing trial, including Sarah Osborne, who died in prison on May 10, 1692. The total death toll was twenty-five people: nineteen hanged, one pressed to death, and at least five dead in jail. More than 200 people had been accused, and thirty were found guilty.
How the Trials Ended
The trials began to collapse in the fall of 1692. On October 3, Increase Mather — the influential minister and president of Harvard — publicly condemned the use of spectral evidence as unreliable and dangerous.
Around the same time, the accusations reached too close to the top: when the governor’s own wife was accused, Governor Phips acted. On October 29, he ordered a halt to the proceedings of the Court of Oyer and Terminer and established a Superior Court of Judicature, which was instructed not to admit spectral evidence. When trials resumed in January and February of 1693, only three of the 56 people indicted were convicted.
By May 1693, Phips had pardoned everyone still imprisoned on witchcraft charges. The crisis was over, but the damage was done.
Why Did It Happen? The Theories
Historians have spent more than three centuries trying to explain Salem, and the most widely accepted view is that there was no single cause — a set of pressures converged at once.
The first pressure was religious and political fear. Puritans believed the Devil was actively working in the world, and the colony was in crisis — its charter revoked, its government uncertain, its frontier at war. In that atmosphere, a witchcraft conspiracy felt plausible.
The second pressure was social division. Salem Village was split by land disputes, arguments over the ministry, and resentment between the farming village and the wealthier port town. Historians have shown that many accusers and accused fell on opposite sides of these village fault lines, and accusations became a weapon in existing feuds.
The third pressure was the legal system itself. Once the court accepted spectral evidence, the trials became almost impossible to stop: the more people were accused, the more names the accused gave up to save themselves, feeding the panic in a vicious cycle.
There is also a famous medical theory. In 1976, the psychologist Linnda Caporael proposed in the journal Science that the afflicted girls were suffering from ergot poisoning — ergot is a fungus that grows on rye in cold, damp conditions, and its compounds can cause convulsions and hallucinations. But the Salem Witch Museum and other scholars have pointed out serious problems: in most households only one or two people fell ill even though the whole family ate the same rye, and the symptoms did not match convulsive ergotism.
Whatever combination of causes was at work, one pattern is clear: the accusations fell hardest on people who were already vulnerable — the poor, the elderly, and women who lived outside the norms of their community. When the accusations finally reached the powerful, the trials stopped.
The Aftermath: Apologies, Pardons, and the Last Exoneration
Salem did not move on quickly. In 1697, the Massachusetts General Court declared a day of fasting and prayer, and the judge Samuel Sewall publicly apologized for his role. In 1702, the General Court declared the trials unlawful, and in 1711 the legislature annulled many convictions and paid compensation to the families.
Some of the accusers later admitted that they had fabricated their charges. Ann Putnam Jr., one of the original accusers, publicly apologized in 1706. Others never spoke of it again.
But the clearing of names took far longer than anyone expected. It was not until July 2022 — 330 years after the trials — that Elizabeth Johnson Jr., the last convicted Salem witch whose name had not yet been cleared, was officially exonerated by the Massachusetts legislature.
Today, Salem is both a memorial and a tourist destination. The Salem Witch Museum, the Peabody Essex Museum, and the Witch Trials Memorial honor the victims, and the original court records are preserved and available to researchers. The trials remain a warning — about what happens when fear replaces evidence, and when a community turns on its own.
FAQ
How many people died in the Salem witch trials?
Twenty-five people died: nineteen were hanged, one man — Giles Corey — was pressed to death under heavy stones, and at least five died in jail without trial. More than 200 people were accused and thirty were convicted.
Was anyone burned at the stake in Salem?
No. Burning was a punishment used in some European witch trials, but no one in Salem was burned. The nineteen executed victims were hanged on Gallows Hill, and Giles Corey was pressed to death.
Who were the first people accused?
The first three accused were Tituba, an enslaved woman in the Parris household; Sarah Good, a homeless beggar; and Sarah Osborne, an elderly impoverished woman. The girls named them on February 29, 1692.
What was spectral evidence?
Spectral evidence was testimony that the accusers had seen and been attacked by the invisible specters of the accused. The court accepted this as proof, even though no one else could see what the accusers claimed to see. When the practice was finally condemned and banned, the trials collapsed.
What caused the girls’ fits?
Historians do not agree on a single cause. Theories include deliberate acting, the pressure of strict Puritan life, social tensions, and ergot poisoning from fungus on rye. The ergot theory, proposed in 1976, has been widely challenged, and most historians believe a combination of social, religious, and psychological pressures best explains the crisis.
Related reading: The Lost Colony of Roanoke: What Happened? | The Mothman Legend of Point Pleasant | The Boston Tea Party of 1773: History
Sources: Smithsonian Magazine: A Brief History of the Salem Witch Trials; Encyclopaedia Britannica: Salem Witch Trials; Peabody Essex Museum: The Salem Witch Trials of 1692; Wikipedia: Salem Witch Trials; Salem Witch Museum: Debunking the “Moldy Bread” Theory; McGill University: Chemical Witchcraft in Salem