Salem Sixteen Ninety-Two

In January of sixteen ninety-two, two young girls in the parsonage of Salem Village began having convulsions. Betty Parris was nine. Her cousin Abigail Williams was eleven. Their father, the Reverend Samuel Parris, sent for the village doctor. When no physical cause was found, the diagnosis became witchcraft.

What followed over the next eight months was one of the most concentrated episodes of mass hysteria in American history. Accusations spread from Salem Village outward across Essex County. Ultimately, more than two hundred people were accused of witchcraft. Nineteen were hanged on Proctor's Ledge, a rocky hillside on the outskirts of Salem Town. One man, Giles Corey, was pressed to death with stones over the course of two days when he refused to enter a plea. Five more died in jail.

The accused were not marginal people. They included a former minister, a four-year-old child, a man who owned more land than almost anyone in the county, and a woman so respected in Boston that her arrest provoked outrage in the colonial capital. The accusers were mostly young women, many of them servants or poor farm girls, with almost no legal or social power of their own.

By October, Governor William Phips dissolved the special court. Within two years, the colony had formally declared the trials unlawful. In seventeen eleven, the Massachusetts General Court reversed the attainders and paid reparations to the families of the executed.

Scholars still debate what happened in Salem. Ergotism, social conflict, land disputes, theological anxiety, and political crisis have all been proposed. The simplest answer may be the hardest: ordinary people, under enormous pressure, destroyed their neighbors. Massachusetts has never fully forgotten it.