The Salem Witch Trials

Summary

Around two hundred people were accused. Nineteen were hanged. One was crushed to death under stones for refusing to enter a plea. At least five died in gaol.

The registry keeps this record as the most important in the archive, and it will state why at the top rather than at the bottom.

The Salem trials did not end because people stopped believing in witches. They ended because a court stopped accepting a kind of evidence that could not be tested.

That is the entire thesis of this archive, at the highest stakes it has ever been tried at, and it cost twenty lives to establish.

What is documented

The onset. In January 1692, in the household of the Reverend Samuel Parris in Salem Village, two girls, Betty Parris, aged nine, and Abigail Williams, aged eleven, began to have fits. They contorted, screamed, threw things, and complained of being pinched and pricked by something unseen.

The local physician, William Griggs, examined them, found no physical cause, and suggested bewitchment.

The first accused. Tituba, an enslaved woman in the Parris household; Sarah Good, who was destitute; and Sarah Osborne, who was old and had not attended church.

Tituba's confession. Under examination, Tituba confessed. She described a book, a black man, animals, and an elaborate apparatus of witchcraft. She named others.

The confession is the hinge. Before it, there were three accused and a household in distress. After it, there was an organised conspiracy, and organised conspiracies have members, and members can be found.

Spectral evidence. This is the legal core of the case, and it is the one thing everybody should know about Salem and almost nobody does.

The Court of Oyer and Terminer, convened in June 1692, admitted spectral evidence: testimony that the shape or spectre of the accused had appeared to an afflicted person and tormented them.

Consider what that means for a defendant. You are accused of an act committed by your apparition. You cannot produce an alibi, because your body's whereabouts are irrelevant. You cannot call a witness, because only the afflicted can see it. You cannot disprove it, because there is nothing to disprove.

Spectral evidence is unfalsifiable. Once a court admits it, the outcome is no longer determined by the evidence. It is determined by the accusation.

The toll. Nineteen executed by hanging. Giles Corey pressed to death for refusing to plead. At least five died in custody. Around two hundred were accused, and around thirty were convicted.

The pattern of accusation. The historians Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum established, in Salem Possessed (1974), that the accusations map with remarkable precision onto an existing factional split in the village.

Salem Village was divided, and had been for years, over the minister, over money, and over whether the village should separate from Salem Town. The accusers clustered in the western, agrarian, poorer part of the village, aligned with the Putnam family. The accused clustered disproportionately in the eastern part, closer to the town, and more prosperous.

The witches were, to a striking degree, the neighbours the accusers already had reason to hate.

How it stopped. In October 1692, Increase Mather and other ministers argued against spectral evidence, and Mather set down the principle plainly: it were better that ten suspected witches should escape than that one innocent person be condemned.

Governor William Phips dissolved the Court of Oyer and Terminer and constituted a new court, the Superior Court of Judicature, which would not admit spectral evidence.

It acquitted almost everybody who came before it.

The apologies. In 1697 the colony held a day of fasting. Samuel Sewall, one of the judges, stood in his church and had his public apology read out. The jurors signed a statement of regret. In 1711 the colony passed a bill restoring the rights of the convicted and granting some restitution.

Leading explanations

The registry separates two questions that are almost always run together, because only one of them is hard.

Why were the girls afflicted? Disputed, and probably unanswerable.

Ergotism. Proposed by Linnda Caporael in Science in 1976: rye infected with the ergot fungus, producing convulsions and hallucinations.

It was rebutted in the same journal, in the same year, by Nicholas Spanos and Jack Gottlieb, and the rebuttal is decisive. Ergot poisoning does not select individuals within a household; it affects everyone eating the bread. Its characteristic outcome is gangrene, and there is none in the record. And the afflicted recovered when they were away from the people they were accusing, which no fungus can arrange.

Ergotism is not the answer, and it is the answer most people have heard.

Conversion disorder and mass psychogenic illness. The leading psychological reading, and consistent with everything else in this archive's Mass and Collective category: a population under sustained strain, and a culturally available template for what distress looks like.

Salem in 1692 was under strain of a particular and severe kind. There was war on the frontier. There were refugees in the village from destroyed settlements in Maine, some of them children who had seen their families killed. There was factional hatred. There was a minister nobody could agree about.

Fraud, in part. Some of the later accusations were almost certainly not sincere. The registry states this and cannot apportion it.

Why did it kill twenty people? Not disputed, and this is the part that matters.

Because a court admitted evidence that could not be tested, and because the accusation pattern followed existing enmities, and because confession was rewarded with life while denial was punished with death, which is an arrangement that manufactures confessions and therefore manufactures accomplices.

Every one of those is a mechanism, not a mystery.

Current status

Partially explained. The social, factional and legal mechanisms are well established and are not seriously in dispute. The origin of the girls' afflictions in January 1692 is disputed and, at three hundred and thirty years' distance, very likely unrecoverable.

The registry keeps this record as its founding case, and files it with AR-0014 as the two entries a reader should take away.

The Bermuda Triangle shows what happens when nobody checks the sources. Salem shows what happens when the court will not permit checking. The first costs you a false belief. The second cost twenty people their lives, and it was stopped not by scepticism, not by enlightenment, and not by mercy, but by a rule about what may be admitted as evidence.

That is not an inspiring conclusion. It is a procedural one, and it is the one that worked.

Last reviewed: July 2026. Records are provisional. Where the evidence changes, the entry changes. Found an error? Tell us.