Salem Witch Trials

David Lewis

Period. 2

Salem Witch Trials

The Salem witch trials were a series of religion crazed hearings and prosecutions

of people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts, between February 1692 and

May 1693. Despite being generally known as the Salem witch trials, the preliminary

hearings in 1692 were conducted in a variety of towns across the province. From June

through September of 1692, nineteen men and women, all having been convicted of

witchcraft, were carted to Gallows Hill, a barren slope near Salem Village, for hanging.

Another man of over eighty years was pressed to death under heavy stones for refusing to

submit to a trial on witchcraft charges. Hundreds of others faced accusations of

witchcraft. Dozens sat in jail for months without trials.

A "witchcraft craze" rippled through Europe from the 1300s to the end of the

1600s. Tens of thousands of supposed witches—mostly women—were executed. Though

the Salem trials came on just as the European craze was winding down, local

circumstances explain their onset. Then, almost as soon as it had begun, the hysteria that

swept through Puritan Massachusetts ended. Several centuries ago, many practicing

Christians, and those of other religions, had a strong belief that the Devil could give

certain people known as witches the power to harm others in return for their loyalty.

In January of 1692, Reverend Parris' daughter Elizabeth, age 9, and niece Abigail

Williams, age 11, started having "fits." They screamed, threw things, uttered peculiar

sounds and contorted themselves into strange positions, and a local doctor blamed the

supernatural. Another girl, Ann Putnam, age 11, experienced similar episodes. On

February 29, under pressure from magistrates Jonathan Corwin and John Hathorne, the

girls blamed three women for afflicting them: Tituba, the Parris' Caribbean slave; Sarah

Good, a homeless beggar; and Sarah Osborne, an elderly impoverished...