By Emilia Wellesley · Published May 5, 2026 · Updated May 5, 2026
What Were the Salem Witch Trials?
The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions in colonial Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. More than two hundred people were accused of witchcraft. Nineteen were hanged, one was pressed to death under stones, and at least five more died in jail. The episode remains the deadliest witchcraft panic in North American history.
The records survived because Puritan New England wrote everything down. Court clerks transcribed examinations in the meeting house at Salem Village. Ministers kept journals. Neighbors signed petitions for and against the accused. The Essex County Court of Oyer and Terminer left a paper trail that historians have read and reread for three centuries, and most of it is now digitized through the University of Virginia’s Salem Witchcraft Papers archive [1]. What survives is not a single story but a tangle of stories, written down by people whose own lives were ending or about to end inside them.
This guide moves through the trials by following the people. It begins with the three women first accused in March 1692, follows the panic into the courtrooms of summer, and closes with the figures who pulled the colony back from itself. The aim is to make the documentary record legible without flattening the strangeness or the suffering it preserves, set within the broader landscape of mystical and occult practices.
How the Panic Began: Salem Village, January 1692
The trouble started in the parsonage of Reverend Samuel Parris (1653-1720), a former merchant turned minister who had taken the contentious pulpit at Salem Village in 1689. In January 1692, his nine-year-old daughter Betty Parris and his eleven-year-old niece Abigail Williams began suffering fits. They contorted, screamed, complained of unseen pinches, and crawled under furniture. The local physician, William Griggs, examined them and offered a diagnosis with no remedy: the girls were under “an Evil Hand.”
A neighbor, Mary Sibley, suggested a folk countermeasure. On 25 February 1692 she instructed Tituba and her husband John Indian, the Parrises’ enslaved household servants, to bake a “witch cake,” a mixture of rye meal and the afflicted girls’ urine, and feed it to the family dog. The idea, drawn from English folk practice, was that the cake would name the witch by causing the dog to react. Parris later condemned Sibley publicly for using “diabolical means” to fight the devil. The cake did nothing. The fits continued, and the children began to name names.
The Three Women First Accused
By the end of February, Betty Parris and Abigail Williams had named three women: Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborne. Each fit a profile that Salem Village was already prepared to suspect. The first accusations were issued on 29 February 1692 and the women were examined publicly in the meeting house on 1 March. The transcripts of those examinations survive and are the documentary opening of the trials.
Tituba: The Enslaved Witness Whose Confession Set the Pattern
Tituba, an enslaved woman whose origins were probably Arawak from South America, had been purchased by Samuel Parris during his years as a merchant in Barbados and brought to Massachusetts as part of his household. Her surname is not recorded. Under examination by Magistrate John Hathorne, Tituba first denied the accusations and then, after returning to court, confessed in lurid detail. She described a tall man dressed in black who came to her with a book, four other witches who flew on poles, and familiars in the shape of a yellow bird, a hog, and a great black dog. Her confession lent the magistrates a script. Several later confessors, faced with the choice between hanging and elaborate confession, would borrow her vocabulary almost word for word. Tituba was jailed but never tried. After more than a year in prison she was released to a new owner who paid her jail fees.
Sarah Good: The Beggar at the Door
Sarah Good (1653-1692) was a homeless beggar by the time of her arrest. The daughter of a Wenham innkeeper whose suicide and family dispute had stripped her of her inheritance, she lived with her second husband William and a four-year-old daughter named Dorothy, sleeping in barns and begging at neighbors’ doors. When refused alms, she muttered. Witnesses testified that her muttering was followed by misfortune to the household animals or children. At her examination, Good denied witchcraft and accused Sarah Osborne instead. Her four-year-old Dorothy was also arrested and questioned and admitted to having a familiar, a small snake that sucked her finger. Sarah Good was hanged on 19 July 1692, after telling the minister Nicholas Noyes from the gallows, “I am no more a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take away my life God will give you blood to drink.”
Sarah Osborne: The Bedridden Defendant
Sarah Osborne (c. 1643-1692) had not attended church for over a year by 1692 because of chronic illness. She had also remarried after her first husband’s death in a way her in-laws disputed, taking on the indentured servant Alexander Osborne and trying to settle her late husband’s estate on her own sons rather than abide by the original will. Her absence from worship, her property dispute, and her new husband’s lower status made her socially exposed. She denied the witchcraft charge throughout her examination and accused no one else. She never came to trial. Sarah Osborne died in Boston jail on 10 May 1692, the first death of the panic and one not always counted in the standard total of nineteen executed.
The Court of Oyer and Terminer
The acting governor of Massachusetts, Sir William Phips (1651-1695), arrived from England on 14 May 1692 with the new colonial charter. Confronted by jails already full of accused witches, he established a Court of Oyer and Terminer, Anglo-Norman legal language meaning “to hear and determine,” on 27 May. He named Lieutenant Governor William Stoughton (1631-1701) as chief justice and seven associate justices, including the wealthy Boston merchant Samuel Sewall (1652-1730), whose later diary became one of the most candid Puritan documents ever written.
The court’s most consequential decision was procedural. It admitted spectral evidence, testimony that the accused’s spectre or shape had appeared to torment the accuser, even when the accused was demonstrably elsewhere. According to Encyclopaedia Britannica, this evidentiary innovation, defended by Stoughton against the cautious counsel of Boston ministers, made conviction nearly automatic once a person had been “cried out upon” by an afflicted child.
Profiles of the Hanged
Nineteen people were executed by hanging on Proctor’s Ledge, a rocky outcrop near Gallows Hill, between 10 June and 22 September 1692. Fourteen were women, five were men. They were hanged in batches of one, five, five, five, and three. A handful of profiles, drawn from the surviving petitions and trial records, give a sense of the population the court convicted.
Bridget Bishop: The First to Hang
Bridget Bishop (c. 1632-1692), a thrice-married Salem Town tavern keeper in her late fifties, had been suspected of witchcraft for nearly twenty years before 1692. Neighbors testified to dolls with pins stuck in them found in her cellar walls, to her red bodice, to her habit of arguing back. She was the first person tried by the new court, on 2 June 1692, and was hanged eight days later on 10 June. Her trial set the tempo for the rest of the summer.
Rebecca Nurse: The Devout Grandmother
Rebecca Nurse (1621-1692) was a seventy-one-year-old church member of impeccable reputation, partially deaf, and a matriarch of one of Salem Village’s prosperous families. Thirty-nine neighbors signed a petition attesting to her piety, the most signatures gathered for any defendant. The jury initially returned a verdict of not guilty. Stoughton, dissatisfied, asked them to reconsider one of the witnesses’ statements. They returned a guilty verdict. Governor Phips granted a temporary reprieve, then withdrew it. Nurse was hanged on 19 July 1692. Her conviction shocked even the trial’s supporters and is often cited as the moment community confidence began to crack.
George Burroughs: The Minister at the Gallows
George Burroughs (c. 1650-1692), a Harvard-educated former minister of Salem Village, was hanged on 19 August 1692 on charges that he was the ringleader of the witches’ coven. Witnesses described his unusual physical strength, alleged he had killed his first two wives, and reported he had attended a witches’ sabbath in a pasture near the parsonage. From the gallows, Burroughs recited the Lord’s Prayer flawlessly, a feat the popular tradition held a witch could not perform. The crowd nearly halted the execution. Cotton Mather (1663-1728), the Boston minister who had observed the trial from horseback, addressed the spectators and reminded them that the devil could appear as an angel of light. The hangings proceeded.
Giles Corey: Pressed to Death
Giles Corey (c. 1611-1692), an eighty-one-year-old farmer whose wife Martha had already been condemned, refused to enter a plea when brought before the court. Under English common law, refusal of plea triggered the procedure of peine forte et dure, “strong and harsh punishment,” in which the accused was placed under boards and increasingly heavy stones until he either pleaded or died. Corey lay under stones in a Salem field for two days. Sheriff George Corwin pressed his tongue back into his mouth with a cane when it was forced out by the weight. Corey reportedly answered each request to plead with the words “more weight,” and died on 19 September 1692. His silence preserved his estate for his sons rather than forfeiting it to the colony, which is the structural reason often given for his choice.
Accusers, Confessors, and the Inner Circle
The trials were driven by testimony from a small group of mostly young accusers in Salem Village. Their voices fill the surviving examinations and are the engine of the panic.
- Ann Putnam Jr.: Twelve years old in 1692, daughter of one of the village’s most aggrieved factional households. Her testimony helped condemn many of the executed. In 1706 she stood in church and asked forgiveness in writing, the only accuser to publicly recant.
- Abigail Williams: Eleven-year-old niece of Samuel Parris and one of the two original afflicted girls. She vanishes from the historical record after the panic.
- Mercy Lewis: A nineteen-year-old servant in the Putnam household, a Maine refugee whose family had been killed in earlier frontier wars. Her testimony was unusually graphic.
- Mary Warren: Servant of John and Elizabeth Proctor. Initially recanted her accusations and was promptly accused herself, then resumed afflicted behaviour to escape jail.
- Dorothy Good: Sarah Good’s four-year-old daughter, examined under what was effectively psychological torture and held in chains for nearly nine months. Modern historians regard her case as the most disturbing single record in the entire archive.
A second group, the confessors, also shaped the trials. Roughly fifty-five people confessed to witchcraft, most under intense pressure and the implicit promise that confessors would not be hanged. None of those who confessed and named other witches were executed. The pattern was visible to contemporaries and used by Robert Calef, a Boston merchant whose 1700 polemic More Wonders of the Invisible World [3] preserved much of what we know about the trials’ coercive dynamics.
How the Trials Ended
By October 1692, the accusations had widened past the point any colonial elite could comfortably contain. Mary Phips, the governor’s wife, was named. So was Samuel Willard, the influential Boston minister who had been counselling restraint. Increase Mather (1639-1723), Cotton Mather’s father and a senior figure in colonial Massachusetts, circulated a manuscript titled Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits. His core argument: spectral evidence was unreliable because the devil could impersonate an innocent person. He famously wrote that it were better that ten witches escape than one innocent person be condemned.
Governor Phips dissolved the Court of Oyer and Terminer on 29 October 1692. He established a new Superior Court of Judicature in January 1693, which barred spectral evidence. Of fifty-six people tried under the new rules, only three were convicted, and Phips reprieved them. By May 1693 he had pardoned and released all remaining prisoners.
The reckoning began almost immediately. On 14 January 1697, the Massachusetts General Court declared a day of fasting and contrition. Samuel Sewall stood in his pew at Boston’s Old South Church while his minister read aloud Sewall’s signed confession of error and shame for his role on the bench. According to the Smithsonian Magazine retrospective, twelve of the original trial jurors signed a similar collective apology. In 1711 the colony reversed many of the attainders and granted financial restitution to families. The last formal exoneration of an accused witch, Elizabeth Johnson Jr., was passed by the Massachusetts state legislature in 2022, three hundred and thirty years after her conviction.
What the Trials Tell Us Now
Salem has become a metaphor for any panic that runs ahead of evidence, but the historical event is stranger and more specific than the metaphor allows. It happened in a single county, on the heels of a brutal frontier war, in a colony whose charter had just been revoked and renegotiated, under a freshly arrived governor who delegated the cases to subordinates committed to a particular evidentiary theory. Every one of those conditions mattered.
Modern scholarship has tested several explanatory frameworks. Boyer and Nissenbaum’s Salem Possessed (1974) traced the geographic pattern of accusations to the factional split between the agricultural west of Salem Village and the mercantile east toward Salem Town. Mary Beth Norton’s In the Devil’s Snare (2002) read the panic against the trauma of King William’s War on the Maine frontier and the refugee status of several accusers. Emerson Baker’s A Storm of Witchcraft (2014) emphasized the legal vacuum of the new charter and the personal beliefs of Stoughton. Each reading complicates the others without dissolving any of them.
The records remain unfinished business. The transcripts that survive were written by court clerks, not by the accused, and the voices of the dead reach us through hostile mediation. Reading the depositions in the original spelling, watching a witness slowly elaborate a memory she had not produced the day before, is the closest one can get to the meeting house in the spring of 1692. The dust is still on the artifact. The historian’s hand has not finished brushing it away.
