Witchcraft

The Salem Witch Trials

• The Salem witch trials began during the spring of 1692, after a group of young girls in Salem Village, Massachusetts, claimed to be possessed by the devil and accused several local women of witchcraft.The first convicted witch, Bridget Bishop, was hanged that June. Eighteen others followed Bishop to Salem's Gallows Hill, while some 150 more men, women and children were accused over the next several months.

•In January 1692, 9-year-old Elizabeth Parris and 11-year-old Abigail Williams began having fits, including violent contortions and uncontrollable outbursts of screaming. After a local doctor, William Griggs, diagnosed bewitchment, other young girls in the community began to exhibit similar symptoms. In late February, arrest warrants were issued for the Parris' slave, Tituba, along with two other women-the homeless beggar Sarah Good and the poor, elderly Sarah Osborn-whom the girls accused of bewitching them.

•The three accused women were brought before the magistrates and questioned, even as their accusers appeared in the courtroom in a grand display of spasms, contortions and screaming. Though Good and Osborn denied their guilt, Tituba confessed. Likely seeking to save herself from certain conviction by acting as an informer, she claimed there were other witches in service of the devil. As hysteria spread into the rest of Massachusetts, a number of others were accused.

•Like Tituba, several accused "witches" confessed and named others. the trials soon began to overwhelm the local justice system. In May 1692, the new governor of Massachusetts, ordered the establishment of a special Court of Oyer (to hear) and Terminer (to decide) on witchcraft cases.

•Presided over by judges the court handed down its first conviction, against Bridget Bishop, on June 2( hanged eight days later). 5 more people were hanged that July; 5 in August and 8 more in September. In addition, 7 other accused witches died in jail

•Though the respected minister Cotton Mather had warned of the dubious value of spectral evidence , his concerns went largely unheeded during the Salem witch trials. Increase Mather, president of Harvard College later joined his son in urging that the standards of evidence for witchcraft must be equal to those for any other crime, concluding that "It would better that ten suspected witches may escape than one innocent person be condemned".Governor Phips dissolved the Court of Oyer and Terminer in October and mandated that its successor disregard spectral evidence. Trials continued with intensity until early 1693, and by that May Phips had pardoned and released all those in prison on witchcraft charges.