Real Crime Stories/Paranormal Hauntings

The Salem Witch Trials (Part 1)

The Salem witch trials were hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts from February 1692 – May 1693. Nineteen of the 200 people accused of witchcraft were found guilty and executed by hanging—14 women and 5 men. Giles Corey was crushed to death when he refused to plead guilty and five died in jail. This was the deadliest witch hunt in the history of colonial North America.

Twelve other women were executed in Massachusetts and Connecticut during the 17th century in the period known as the Salem Witch Trials where preliminary hearings where conducted in towns like Salem Village (now Danvers), Ipswich, and Andover in 1692. The most infamous trials were conducted by the Court of Oyer and Terminer in Salem Town in 1692.

These witch trials were notorious cases of mass hysteria in Colonial America and were used in political rhetoric and popular literature showing vivid cautionary to the dangers of isolationism, religious extremism, false accusations, and lapses in due process. While it is not unique, the Colonia American example has a broader phenomenon of the witch trials in the early modern period which also took place in Europe. Many history consider the lasting effects of the trials to be influential in United States history. George Lincoln Burr is said to have stated, "the Salem witchcraft was the rock on which the theocracy shattered."

The 300th anniversary in 1992 commemorates the victims of the Salem witch trials in a park in Salem as well as one in Danvers. An act passed in November 2001 by the Massachusetts legislature exonerates the five people and still another one passed in 1957 previously exonerated six other victims. By 2004, there was talk about exonerating all the victims despite some that think that happened during the 19th century when the Massachusetts colonial legislature asked to reverse the attainders of George Burroughs and others. in January 2016, the University of Virginia announced the Gallows Hill Project team to determine where the execution site in Salem where 19 "witches" were hanged. The city owns the site and planned to establish a memorial to the victims.

Background

While witch trials in Europe were beginning to fade out in the mid-17th Europe, the surrounding areas of Europe and Colonial America during 1692 and 1693 had brief outbursts of hysteria in Salem in the New World.

In "Against Modern Sadducism" (1668), Joseph Glanvill made the claim that he could prove the existence of witches and ghosts in the supernatural realm, when he wrote about the "denial of the bodily resurrection and the [supernatural] spirits."

Glanvill claimed that ingenious men should believe in witches and apparitions. If they doubted the reality of spirits, they not only denied demons, but the almighty God too. Glanvill set out to prove the supernatural could not be denied, and those who did deny apparitions where considered heretics as it also disproved their beliefs in angels. Glanvill, as well as works by Cotton Mather, attempted to prove that "demons were alive."

Accusations

The witch trials started after people were accused of witchcraft by teen girls like Elizabeth Hubbard, 17, and some even younger.

Recorded Witchcraft Executions in New England

The earliest recorded witchcraft executions was Alse Young in 1647 in Hartford, Connecticut. Historian Clarence F. Jewett included others who were executed in New England in his 1881 book.

Political Context

People came to the New World of Colonial America to escape religious persecution and build a Bible-based society. Living by a closed sense of the supernatural, the original 1629 Royal Charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony was vacated in 1684 when King James II installed Sir Edmund Andros as governor of the Dominion of New England. Andros was ousted in 1689 after the "Glorious Revolution" in England replaced the Catholic James II with Protestant co-rulers William and Mary.