The Massachusetts Bay Colony Court That Executed Twenty People for Witchcraft in 1692 on the Basis of Adolescent Girls' Spectral-Evidence Testimony

In January 1692 Betty Parris (9) and Abigail Williams (11), respectively the daughter and niece of the Reverend Samuel Parris of Salem Village (modern Danvers, Massachusetts), began to display behaviours their household interpreted as supernatural affliction: violent contortions, sudden screams, inability to speak, claims of being pinched and bitten by invisible attackers.

The local doctor William Griggs, after examining the girls, concluded that they were under demonic attack. By late February the symptoms had spread to several other adolescent and young-adult girls in Salem Village. Under pressure to name the witches afflicting them, the original accusers identified three women on 29 February 1692: the enslaved Caribbean-born woman Tituba (a Parris household servant), the homeless beggar Sarah Good, and the elderly invalid Sarah Osborne.

Tituba confessed under examination. Her confession — elaborate, naming additional witches whom the magistrates had not yet considered — established the legal pattern for the next ten months. Confession meant survival; denial meant trial. Approximately fifty subsequent accused witches confessed during 1692. None of the confessors was executed.

The Court of Oyer and Terminer

The newly arrived Massachusetts governor Sir William Phips established the special Court of Oyer and Terminer (“to hear and determine”) on 27 May 1692 to try the accumulating witchcraft cases. The court’s senior judges included the deputy governor William Stoughton, the merchant Samuel Sewall, the magistrate John Hathorne (whose great-great-grandson Nathaniel Hawthorne would add the w to his surname to dissociate from this ancestry), and the colony’s senior advisory clergy.

The court’s controversial evidentiary innovation was the acceptance of spectral evidence. The afflicted accusers testified that they could see the accused person’s spectre — the spirit form of the witch — flying through the air, choking them, biting them, or signing the Devil’s book. The accused’s spectre might be seen even when the accused was physically miles away. The court accepted this testimony as conclusive evidence of witchcraft.

The theological problem with spectral evidence had been identified by the senior Boston minister Increase Mather as early as June 1692. The Devil — Mather argued — was able to assume the spectral form of any person he chose, whether or not that person was actually a witch. Spectral evidence was therefore not reliable. Mather’s pamphlet Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits Personating Men circulated in manuscript through the Massachusetts clergy during summer 1692.

His son Cotton Mather — Boston’s most prominent younger clergyman — took the opposite position in his own pamphlet Wonders of the Invisible World. Cotton Mather argued that the Salem proceedings were a necessary defence of the colony against a documented diabolical attack. The Mather pamphlets were published within weeks of each other and circulated alongside the trials.

The executions

The trials and executions ran from June to September 1692.

— Bridget Bishop, hanged 10 June 1692 (first execution) — Sarah Good, Susannah Martin, Elizabeth Howe, Sarah Wildes, Rebecca Nurse, all hanged 19 July 1692 — George Burroughs, John Proctor, John Willard, George Jacobs Sr, Martha Carrier, all hanged 19 August 1692 — Martha Corey, Mary Eastey, Alice Parker, Ann Pudeator, Margaret Scott, Wilmott Redd, Samuel Wardwell, Mary Parker, all hanged 22 September 1692

A nineteenth victim, Giles Corey (Martha Corey’s husband), was pressed to death under stones at Salem on 17-19 September 1692 — the only person in American legal history executed by peine forte et dure. Corey was 81 and had refused to enter a plea. The judicial procedure for a defendant who refused to plead was to place increasingly heavy stones on the defendant’s chest until the plea was given or the defendant died. Corey reportedly demanded “more weight.” He died after three days.

Five additional accused — including the original Tituba — died in Salem and Boston jails of disease awaiting trial.

The 20 executed and the 5 dead in prison constitute the 25 deaths of the Salem proceedings.

October 1692

The trials collapsed within weeks of the September executions for several converging reasons.

The accusing girls began to identify witches across an increasingly wide social class. The wife of Governor Phips himself, Lady Mary Phips, was named by one accuser in early October 1692. So was Cotton Mather’s sister-in-law. So were several senior Boston merchants whose social position would have made conviction politically destabilising.

Increase Mather’s pamphlet against spectral evidence was formally adopted by the senior Massachusetts clergy on 3 October 1692. The doctrinal position that supported the trial’s evidentiary basis had collapsed.

Governor Phips dissolved the Court of Oyer and Terminer on 29 October 1692. He pardoned the remaining 52 unexecuted prisoners awaiting trial in May 1693. The first proceedings of the new Superior Court of Judicature in January 1693 explicitly excluded spectral evidence. Of the 56 cases tried, 3 produced convictions; all 3 were pardoned by Phips. No further witchcraft executions took place in colonial New England.

1697

The Massachusetts General Court issued a formal day of fasting and apology on 15 January 1697 for the Salem proceedings. The judge Samuel Sewall read out a personal confession of error in the Boston Old South Meeting House the same day — the only one of the Court of Oyer and Terminer judges who publicly recanted. The afflicted accuser Ann Putnam Jr (then 26) issued a written public apology in 1706, attributing her 1692 testimony to “a great delusion of Satan.”

The Massachusetts General Court formally reversed the witchcraft attainders of the executed in 1711, voted compensation of £578 12 shillings to the survivors’ families, and in October 2001 issued a final formal exoneration of all the executed by name.

The cause of the original 1692 affliction symptoms remains contested. The leading modern explanations include ergot poisoning from rye grain (Linnda Caporael, 1976), mass psychogenic illness (Mary Beth Norton, 2002), and deliberate adolescent attention-seeking compounded by an evidentiary system that rewarded sustained accusation. No single explanation accounts for all features of the documented record.

A simple memorial garden in central Salem, dedicated in 1992 on the 300th anniversary, lists the 20 executed by name and date. Each name is carved on a stone bench. The garden adjoins the Old Burying Point cemetery where two of the original judges — Hathorne and Bartholomew Gedney — are buried.