20 Salem Witch Trial Myths People Still Believe

The first thing that comes to mind when you think of Salem’s witches may be flames. Yet, under English common law, which Massachusetts followed, witchcraft was considered a capital felony punishable by hanging, unlike the burning of heretics on the Continent. 19 convicted witches were hanged in 1692; one man, Giles Corey, was pressed to death. Zero were burned.

Giles Corey was an 81-year-old Salem farmer charged with witchcraft in 1692. Refusing to plead, he simply stood mute in court, and thus was subjected to pressing rather than a proper trial. His silence, though, prevented the Crown from seizing his property, and his land instead went to his sons-in-law. On September 19, 1692, after three days of being pressed under increasing stones, he died. Only Robert Calef, a Boston merchant and critic of the trials, wrote of his last words, quoted as “more weight,” in a book that wasn’t published until 1700, years after the fact.

Tituba, the enslaved woman in the household of the Reverend Samuel Parris, Salem Village’s minister, is now most often remembered as a Black woman practicing West African voodoo. Yet 1692 court records identify her as “Indian,” and historian Elaine Breslaw says she was likely from South America or the Caribbean. Charles Upham, a historian, created the image of her as a Black woman in 1867, and it was later popularized by 20th-century film and theater, most notably Arthur Miller’s The Crucible.

In 1976, behavioral psychologist Linnda Caporael argued that a hallucinogenic fungus found on rye bread, known as ergot, was responsible for the fits suffered by the Salem accusers, a group of young girls in the village. In the same year, researchers Nicholas Spanos and Jack Gottlieb debunked this in the journal Science. It causes gangrene and vomiting, but no one in Salem was struck with these symptoms, and it wouldn’t selectively affect some members of a household while sparing others.

In The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s 1953 play, the girls dance in a ring around a forest cauldron, but we have no 1692 records of this; they did play a game in which they dropped egg whites into a glass of water, reading the shapes to try to determine their future husbands’ trades. And on February 25, 1692, the neighbor Mary Sibley had a “witch cake” made out of rye meal and the urine of the girls, which was then baked and fed to a dog.

The image people have in their minds of the typical witch is a poor, disreputable woman. Yet about a quarter of those accused during the hysteria were men, and five of the 19 hanged were men, including the minister George Burroughs and the farmer John Proctor. Also on the list of alleged witches were affluent townspeople and pious church members such as Rebecca Nurse, a pillar of the community. In short, Salem’s victims spanned the entire social spectrum.

According to popular tradition, all 19 were executed on top of Salem’s Gallows Hill. But in January 2016, researchers assembled by the Gallows Hill Project, including historians Emerson Baker and Marilynne Roach, drew on eyewitness accounts recorded in 1692 and plotted them onto a map using specialized software. Their conclusion: The hangings took place on Proctor’s Ledge, a rocky ledge at the bottom of the hill, rather than its peak.

Although Cotton Mather, a leading Boston clergyman, is often seen as the mastermind behind the trials, he was never a judge. The Court of Oyer and Terminer, the special court created to hear the witchcraft cases, was convened in May 1692; its chief magistrate was William Stoughton, the colony’s lieutenant governor. Mather preached in favor of the witch hunts, yet he cautioned judges against relying too heavily on spectral evidence, specifically testimony of a suspect’s specter or “shape.”

An estimated 150 to 200 individuals were accused across the region. 19 were hanged, and one more, Giles Corey, was pressed to death; at least five others died in prison awaiting trial. In October 1692, the royal governor of Massachusetts, William Phips, closed down the court, and all remaining suspects were released from jail by May 1693.

One of the 19 hanged on August 19, 1692, was the minister George Burroughs. According to Robert Calef, a Boston merchant and critic of the trials, in his 1700 narrative, Burroughs was able to recite the Lord’s Prayer perfectly from the gallows, supposedly an impossible feat for a witch. The crowd hesitated, but the clergyman Cotton Mather shouted from his horse: “Beware of the Devil, who sometimes transforms himself into an Angel of Light.” The story is disputed and was not related until years after Burroughs’ execution. He was hanged, though.

Salem was the deadliest witch panic in colonial British North America, with 19 people hanged and another crushed to death by stones. But it’s thought that somewhere between 40,000 and 60,000 people were killed during the Continental European witch hunts, which spanned the early modern era, roughly the 15th to the 18th centuries. In other words, Salem’s notoriety far outstripped its body count.

The witchcraft accusations didn’t just happen in Salem Village. By the time they were over, around 25 New England towns had been involved. Andover, for instance, had more people accused than Salem Village. This latter area was a small, rural settlement with different economic and political interests from nearby Salem Town, which was home to a thriving commercial port.

The Salem witch trials were not the last witch prosecutions in colonial America. In 1706, the “Witch of Pungo,” Grace Sherwood, was tried in Virginia and subjected to ducking, a trial procedure in which a suspect was dunked in water; if she sank, she was innocent, but if she floated, she was guilty. Witchcraft proceedings still occurred in colonial America well over a decade after Salem.

While Salem might conjure images of vigilante hysteria, cases in the Court of Oyer and Terminer were heard according to accepted, albeit flawed, standards of English law. Groups of women known as juries of matrons would search suspects for “witch’s teats” (the supposed nipple-like growths witches allegedly used to nurse their familiar spirits). The courts used touch tests, examination of poppets (tiny dolls), and spectral evidence, which was testimony about what someone saw in another’s “visionary spirit.”

Massachusetts didn’t invent witchcraft law in 1692. It had been a capital felony in England since the Witchcraft Act of 1604, enacted during the reign of King James I, and it was copied verbatim into Massachusetts’s 1641 Body of Liberties. The first known witchcraft execution in the American colonies occurred when Alse Young was hanged in Hartford, Connecticut, on May 26, 1647, 45 years before the Salem witch trials.

Religion alone does not explain Salem, according to historians like Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum, who attribute many of the accusations to an ongoing feud between rural Salem Village and the more prosperous commercial center of Salem Town. It also coincided with King William’s War (1689-1697), a vicious struggle on the Maine frontier that saw refugees pouring into Essex County, Massachusetts.

The Salem witch trials of 1692 occurred toward the later part of Europe’s larger witch-hunting period (roughly the 15th to 18th centuries), rather than near its beginning. Most of this witch-hunting period, by the way, occurred after the Middle Ages. England was starting to move toward the Enlightenment idea that there should be more skepticism about specter-based testimony.

In October 1692, Boston minister Increase Mather published Cases of Conscience, which argued against spectral evidence and wrote: “It were better that ten suspected witches should escape than that one innocent person should be condemned.” By then, accusations had reached even the elite, including, as Governor William Phips learned, his own wife, Mary Phips. Phips dissolved the court that October, and the last prisoners went free the following spring. But belief in witchcraft did not end there.

Pop culture often portrays the accusing girls as bored teenagers acting out for attention. Historian Mary Beth Norton, however, links their fits to real trauma: many of them were refugees who had witnessed violent attacks while living in Maine during King William’s War, then fled to Essex County. Although some of their behavior in court may have been embellished, historians characterize them as suffering involuntary distress, rather than merely acting out.

Those executed were excommunicated and not allowed to be buried in sacred ground, sometimes thrown in small holes near Proctor’s Ledge, the execution site. However, family and local tradition hold that their bodies were later recovered by relatives at night and buried on family land without a headstone.

This content was created with the help of AI.