The Salem Witch Trials (1692–1693)
The Massachusetts witchcraft prosecutions in which more than 200 people were accused and 20 executed, and the legal reckoning that followed — the disqualification of spectral evidence, official apologies, and legislative reversals that made the trials a lasting reference point in debates over due process and mass accusation.
Events
The First Accusations in Salem Village
Two young girls in the household of Reverend Samuel Parris, Betty Parris and Abigail Williams, began suffering fits attributed to witchcraft. A doctor and local magistrates examined them; accusations came to name the Parris family's enslaved woman Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborne, beginning the crisis.
Location: Salem Village, Massachusetts Bay Colony
The Court of Oyer and Terminer Is Established
Governor William Phips created a special court, the Court of Oyer and Terminer, with Lieutenant Governor William Stoughton as chief judge, to try the accumulating cases. On the advice of Cotton Mather, the court admitted "spectral evidence" — testimony that an accused person's spirit appeared to the afflicted.
Location: Boston, Massachusetts Bay Colony
Bridget Bishop Is Hanged
Bridget Bishop became the first person executed, convicted in a trial presided over by the new court. Over the following four months, eighteen more people were hanged and Giles Corey was pressed to death for refusing to enter a plea.
Location: Salem, Massachusetts Bay Colony
Dissent Grows Against the Proceedings
Clergy including Increase Mather and private critics such as Thomas Brattle argued that spectral evidence was unreliable and that the devil could impersonate the innocent. Accusations had by then reached the governor's own wife; public confidence in the court collapsed.
Location: Boston, Massachusetts Bay Colony
Governor Phips Halts the Court and Bars Spectral Evidence
Phips dissolved the Court of Oyer and Terminer, prohibited further arrests, and released many of the imprisoned. The successor Superior Court, sitting from January 1693, was barred from admitting spectral evidence; none of the remaining trials ended in conviction, and the last prisoners were released by May 1693.
Location: Boston, Massachusetts Bay Colony
Public Apology and Legislative Reversal
A day of fasting for the tragedy had been held in 1697, when judge Samuel Sewall publicly apologized. In 1711 the colonial legislature passed a reversal of attainder restoring the rights and names of the condemned and compensating their families; some convictions, including those of five executed in 1692, were not formally cleared until acts of 1957 and 2001.
Location: Boston, Province of Massachusetts Bay
The Trials in American Memory
Arthur Miller's play "The Crucible," which mapped the trials onto the McCarthy-era loyalty investigations, opened on Broadway and fixed Salem as the standing American metaphor for accusation without evidence. Historians continue to debate the causes — religious crisis, frontier war anxiety, factional litigation, and social strain in a theocratic community.
Location: New York, United States