98 Fun Facts About Salem Witch Trials

Why did some acquitted Salem suspects stay locked up?

Unpaid jail fees kept them there; Tituba stayed locked up for some thirteen months until an unknown person paid them and took her.

What did Salem's accused lack at trial?

A defence lawyer was not allowed, so the accused had to defend themselves while their accusers writhed and screamed in the courtroom.

The accusations began in Salem Village, which is known today by what name?

Danvers was then the farming village of Salem Village, which feuded with wealthier Salem Town, where the witch court actually sat.

What was the special court that tried the Salem witchcraft cases in 1692 called?

The Court of Oyer and Terminer sent 19 people to the gallows before the governor shut it down that October and set up a new court.

Which girl was one of the first two in Salem Village to suffer mysterious fits in 1692?

Abigail Williams and her cousin Betty began having fits, and a local doctor who could find no physical cause blamed the supernatural.

Which of the first three women accused was elderly and had rarely attended church meetings?

Sarah Osborne was also scorned for her romance with an indentured servant, whom she later married.

Tituba was enslaved by which Salem Village minister, whose daughter and niece were first afflicted?

Samuel Parris, a former merchant in Barbados, had divided the village well before the trials with his pay demands and his strict preaching.

Why was Tituba pivotal to the trials?

She confessed to witchcraft when examined, and her claim that other witches were at work alongside her set off a hunt for more.

The 1692 'witch cake' was made from rye meal and what, then fed to a dog?

Urine from the afflicted girls was meant to make the cake hurt or expose the witch, but the village minister denounced the charm as blasphemous.

Who was the first person executed in the Salem witch trials, hanged on 10 June 1692?

Bridget Bishop had already been accused of witchcraft years earlier and acquitted, but in 1692 she was convicted and hanged within eight days.

How did Giles Corey die in September 1692?

He refused to enter a plea, so the court used peine forte et dure to try to force one out of him.

Which frail 71-year-old was hanged on 19 July 1692 despite a jury first finding her not guilty?

Rebecca Nurse was excommunicated before she hanged, and family tradition holds that her body was buried in an unmarked grave on the family land.

Which former Salem Village minister was hanged in 1692 despite reciting the Lord's Prayer flawlessly?

George Burroughs had been summoned from his new home in Maine and accused of leading the witches; his prayer moved the crowd, but the hanging went ahead.

Which small child was arrested in March 1692 and kept in jail for about eight months?

Dorothy Good, named Dorcas on her warrant, gave answers that magistrates took as a confession, and she was released on bond that December.

Why did Martha Corey fall under suspicion in 1692?

She had expressed scepticism about the girls' accusations, and because she was a full church member, her arrest suggested that anyone could be a witch.

What was "spectral evidence"?

Testimony that the accused's apparition had afflicted the witness was barred by a new court, and only 3 of 56 defendants were then convicted.

Which Boston minister, author of Wonders of the Invisible World, published pamphlets asserting his belief in witchcraft?

Cotton Mather later led Boston's fight for smallpox inoculation, an idea he learned from Onesimus, an enslaved West African man in his household.

What usually happened to accused Salem witches who confessed?

They were spared the gallows, a lesson the accused soon learned, while those who insisted on their innocence met harsher fates.

Which governor, just back from England in May 1692, set up the court that tried the Salem witches?

William Phips also ended the crisis: by May 1693 he had pardoned everyone still held on witchcraft charges.

Which lieutenant governor presided over the witch court at Salem in 1692?

William Stoughton later ran Massachusetts himself as acting governor after the governor was recalled to England, and he was again acting governor when he died in 1701.

Asking nothing for herself, how did Mary Eastey urge judges to test her accusers?

Question them apart, she urged, to see whether their stories would still match, because she had seen her accusers' wiles at first hand.

On what grounds was Elizabeth Proctor spared execution after being convicted alongside her husband John?

She was pregnant, so her execution was postponed, and by 1693 the hangings had ended and she was freed from jail.

Which Salem witch-trial magistrate was an ancestor of a famous American novelist?

John Hathorne was the great-great-grandfather of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was born in Salem and reportedly added a w to his surname to distance himself from the judge.

Eighth-graders in which class campaigned until the last convicted Salem 'witch' was cleared in 2022?

Civics was the class: the North Andover pupils researched the steps needed, and Elizabeth Johnson Jr.'s pardon was finally tucked into a state budget, 329 years after her conviction.

Which judge had his apology for the trials read to his Boston congregation on 14 January 1697?

Samuel Sewall stood before his congregation while the minister read his apology, and in 1700 he published The Selling of Joseph, an early attack on slavery.

Which afflicted Salem accuser publicly asked forgiveness on joining the church in 1706?

Ann Putnam Jr. blamed Satan for her accusations and begged forgiveness from the families whose relatives had been taken away.

What did Massachusetts grant Salem victims' families in 1711?

Cash compensation, some £600 in all, went to survivors and relatives, along with laws restoring the good names of the condemned.

Several jurors who had condemned Salem's accused later apologized, saying they had been what?

Sadly deluded and mistaken was their own phrase: they feared the evidence had been too weak to take a life, and said they would never do such things again 'for the whole world'.

What did judge Nathaniel Saltonstall do after the witch court's first trial?

He resigned from the bench in June 1692, reportedly dismayed by how the first trial was handled, yet the court went on to hang 18 more people.

Which Salem site was confirmed in 2016 as the place where the 1692 hangings actually happened?

Proctor's Ledge was named as the spot by historian Sidney Perley in 1921, and the city bought it in 1936, but most people kept believing the hangings happened on Gallows Hill's summit.

A 1976 theory blamed the afflicted girls' convulsions on poisoning by which fungus that grows on rye?

Ergot poisoning was proposed in 1976 by psychologist Linnda Caporael, but within months critics argued that the evidence did not support it.

What did examiners in 1692 watch for when a suspect was made to lay hands on a writhing accuser?

Whether the fit stopped: a witch's touch was thought to draw her venom back into her own body, so a calmed accuser counted as a sign of guilt.

Why were Salem's condemned 'witches' hanged rather than burned at the stake?

Under English law it was a felony punished by hanging, while much of Europe typically burned witches as heretics, so no one was burned for witchcraft in America.

What did constable John Willard refuse to do before being accused?

He would not arrest more suspects, whose guilt he doubted, and soon he was charged himself and hanged in August 1692.

What were Salem Village girls reportedly dabbling in before the first fits of 1692?

Fortune-telling came first, reportedly, and by January 1692 two of the girls were screaming, contorting their bodies and complaining of being pinched.

Massachusetts cleared five more hanged Salem 'witches' by name in 2001, in an act signed on which day?

Halloween 2001 was the day it was signed, because a 1957 apology had covered the five only as 'certain other persons' and their descendants wanted them named.

Arthur Miller's 1953 play The Crucible was written as an allegory for what?

McCarthyism was Miller's target, and after he refused to name others before Congress in 1956, he was himself found in contempt, a ruling later overturned.

Which actor starred in the 1996 film of Arthur Miller's The Crucible?

Daniel Day-Lewis met Miller's daughter Rebecca while making the film, and the two married in 1996.

What likely became of most bodies right after Salem's 1692 hangings?

Dumped in a crevice or shallow grave near the gallows, by most accounts, though tradition holds that some families secretly reclaimed their dead for burial at home.

Salem's 'Witch House' museum was once the home of whom?

A trial judge, Jonathan Corwin, lived there, and in the 1940s the house was nearly torn down for a wider road until citizens raised the money to move and restore it.

News of which upheaval in England led Boston's colonists to overthrow governor Edmund Andros in 1689?

The Glorious Revolution toppled King James II, and in its wake Massachusetts was given a new charter and a royally appointed governor.

Refugees from frontier attacks in which war flooded into Essex County just before the trials?

King William's War brought Wabanaki raids on the Maine frontier, and the young accuser Mercy Lewis was a refugee of those frontier wars.

A bronze statue of which TV witch has stood in downtown Salem since 2005?

Samantha from Bewitched got the statue from a cable channel, and at its unveiling protesters hung a banner reading 'SHAME', saying it made light of the 1692 deaths.

Roughly how many people were accused of witchcraft during the Salem episode?

About 200, yet when a new court sat in 1693 it cleared nearly everyone still facing trial, and the three it convicted were pardoned.

What did wealthy Salem merchant Philip English do after being accused in 1692?

He escaped and fled to New York, and the sheriff then seized nearly everything from his house and warehouses, a loss repaid only in small part.

Which famous Mayflower couple's son was accused of witchcraft in 1692?

John and Priscilla Alden's son John, a Boston sea captain in his sixties, was cried out upon by girls who had never even met him.

Which Nobel Peace Prize winner dedicated Salem's witch trials memorial in 1992?

Elie Wiesel dedicated the memorial, where the victims' pleas of innocence are carved into the entrance stones and cut off mid-sentence by the wall, to show how their words went unheard.

Tituba, one of the first three accused, is described in contemporary sources as what?

An 'Indian' is how the records of her own day describe her, yet later writers variously made her Black or half-Indian, and her true origin remains uncertain.

During the Salem panic of 1692, which animals did colonists kill on suspicion of links to the Devil?

Two dogs were killed, one of them in Salem Village, by colonists who believed the animals were in league with the Devil.

Which actress learned on a TV genealogy show that her ancestor Esther Elwell was accused at Salem?

Sarah Jessica Parker traced Esther Elwell on a 2010 genealogy programme, and one of her twin daughters has the middle name Elwell. Her ancestor was freed when the trials were halted.

Which 1993 Disney comedy revives three witch sisters hanged in Salem three centuries earlier?

Hocus Pocus opens in 1693 with the Sanderson sisters condemned by their neighbours; those colonial scenes were shot at Pioneer Village, a recreation of early Salem.

The town name Salem comes from a Hebrew word that is usually said to mean what?

Peace is the usual reading of the Hebrew Shalem, a biblical place name linked to Jerusalem and related to the greeting shalom: a bitterly ironic label for the home of a witch hunt.

Just before Salem's witch court was halted in 1692, accusers reportedly named which woman?

The governor's wife, Lady Mary, was among those 'called out upon' that autumn. Her husband dissolved the court on 29 October, and nobody was hanged after his order.

The title 'Goody' given to many women accused at Salem in 1692 was a short form of which word?

Goodwife was a polite form of address for a woman ranked below a 'Mistress', and a man of the same standing was called Goodman. Both titles had gone out of fashion by the mid-1700s.

Which actress played the teenage ringleader of the accusers in the 1996 film of The Crucible?

Winona Ryder played the scheming accuser in a film whose screenplay Arthur Miller adapted himself from his 1953 play, earning an Oscar nomination for the script.

For centuries, popular belief wrongly placed Salem's 1692 hangings on the summit of which landmark?

Gallows Hill's summit was ruled out partly by a prisoner who said she watched an execution from a house below the hill; the real spot lies near the foot of the slope.

Leaving aside those who died in jail, how many people were hanged in the Salem witch trials of 1692?

19 people were executed that way, fourteen women and five men, on four dates between June and September. Thirty had been found guilty in all.

Which animated sitcom spoofed the Salem witch trials in its 1997 special Treehouse of Horror VIII?

The Simpsons cast Marge as an accused witch in the segment 'Easy-Bake Coven'; its animators rewatched the film of The Crucible several times to design the colonial town.

Which strict Protestant group, dissenters from the Church of England, dominated Salem life in 1692?

Puritans rejected Anglican customs such as kneeling for communion and making the sign of the cross at baptism, which they saw as leftovers of Catholicism.

Salem's afflicted girls complained in 1692 of being pinched by unseen hands and pricked with what?

Pins were only part of it: the girls also screamed, threw things about the room, crawled under furniture and twisted themselves into strange postures.

Searchers hoped to find 'poppets' in the homes of Salem's accused; what kind of object was a poppet?

A doll made to stand for a living person was thought to let a witch strike from a distance, because whatever was done to the figure would befall its human twin.

What were the animal-shaped spirits, such as cats or birds, said to serve Salem's witches called?

Familiars were usually pictured as small creatures fed on milk, bread, meat or blood; one Salem suspect told the court of hogs, rats, a fox and a wolf.

At Salem in 1692, how were witches said to seal their pact with the Devil?

By signing his book: one suspect told the magistrates that a tall man with white hair had pressed her to make her mark in it, and that she had done so.

Examiners searched the bodies of Salem's accused in 1692 for which supposed sign of the Devil?

Moles or birthmarks that were numb to the touch were called witch's teats, and finding one on a suspect was treated as proof in itself.

Giles Corey's refusal to plead at Salem in 1692 is usually explained as a bid to protect what?

His farm and estate could not be confiscated from a man who died unconvicted, runs the usual account; one historian notes much had been seized already and calls his death a protest.

What was the job of William Griggs, traditionally said to have examined Salem's afflicted girls?

Doctor Griggs is the physician tradition names as finding no bodily cause for the fits, which left the supernatural as the answer; his own servant Elizabeth Hubbard became an accuser.

Which condition has been proposed to explain the night-time attacks some Salem accusers described?

Sleep paralysis is one of several medical theories about 1692; another blames a bird-borne brain inflammation, while many historians prefer plain spite and jealousy.

In the play The Crucible, the enslaved Tituba is said to have come from which Caribbean island?

Barbados is the play's answer, but the real Tituba's birthplace is unknown: the only early account, written in 1764, says she was brought from New Spain.

Witchcraft Heights in modern Salem, Massachusetts, is the name of what kind of public institution?

An elementary school carries the name, one of several nods to 1692 in a city where some police cars sport witch logos and the high school teams are called the Witches.

Legend says Giles Corey's dying curse fell on Salem and the holders of which Essex County office?

Sheriff George Corwin, who oversaw Corey's ordeal, died of a heart attack in 1696, and his successors were said to suffer heart or blood ailments until the office left Salem in 1991.

New England's first recorded witchcraft execution came 45 years before Salem, in which colony?

Connecticut executed Alse Young of Windsor in 1647, opening a run of witch trials there that lasted until 1663; her daughter was accused of the same crime some thirty years later.

Salem's 1992 Witch Trials Memorial gives each executed victim which stone feature set into its wall?

A bench of stone slab stands for each person executed in 1692, and Arthur Miller was among the speakers when the park was dedicated for the 300th anniversary.

Which penalty, imposed on Giles Corey in 1692, did Salem's church reverse in 1712?

Excommunication cut the condemned off from their congregations, and Nicholas Noyes, the minister who had imposed it, joined the vote to undo it twenty years later.

One of Salem's first suspects told magistrates in 1692 that witches travelled by riding on what?

Sticks were the transport in one suspect's account, which also featured a winged creature with a woman's head and left its listeners thoroughly confused.

Ingersoll's Ordinary, where many Salem suspects were taken in 1692, was what kind of business?

A tavern kept by Nathaniel Ingersoll, a deacon of the village church; arrest warrants in 1692 ordered constables to bring suspects to his house for examination.

Goody Glover, hanged as a witch in Boston in 1688, answered her judges in which native language?

Irish was Glover's mother tongue, so an interpreter had to be found; asked for the Lord's Prayer, she managed it in Irish and broken Latin but not in English.

Martha Carrier, hanged at Salem in 1692, came from a family blamed for spreading which disease?

Smallpox killed thirteen people in her town in 1690, including her father and two brothers, and at her examination the accusers cried out that they could see thirteen ghosts.

Composer Robert Ward won a 1962 Pulitzer Prize for turning The Crucible into what kind of work?

An opera by Ward opened at New York City Opera in 1961, after Arthur Miller helped to choose its composer; it became one of the most performed American operas.

Which rock musician wrote and directed the 2012 horror film The Lords of Salem, partly shot in the city?

Rob Zombie cast Sheri Moon Zombie as a troubled Salem disc jockey whose life becomes entangled with a coven of ancient Satan-worshipping women.

Which Salem Village churchgoer was rebuked by her minister for having the 1692 'witch cake' baked?

Mary Sibley made a sorrowful confession of what her minister called a grand error, and he warned the whole congregation against going to the Devil for help against the Devil.

Which English actress played Sarah Cloyce in the 1985 PBS miniseries Three Sovereigns for Sarah?

Vanessa Redgrave narrated the story as Cloyce, who lost two sisters to the hangman in 1692; a replica of the village meeting house built for the production can still be toured.

Robert Calef's attack on the Salem trials, unprintable in Boston, came out in 1700 in which city?

London printed the cloth merchant's book, which set court records and petitions beside a triumphant official account; later historians of the trials leaned heavily on his documents.

Which Beverly minister backed the Salem trials at first, then wrote the regretful A Modest Enquiry?

John Hale admitted that 'we walked in the clouds, and could not see our way'; his book on the nature of witchcraft was published in 1702, two years after his death.

Which elderly man, hanged at Salem in August 1692, was accused by his own granddaughter Margaret?

George Jacobs was named by a granddaughter trying to save her own life, a scene Tompkins Matteson painted in 1855; bones believed to be his were given a new grave in 1992.

Which English actor gave his final live-action film performance as Judge Danforth in The Crucible?

Paul Scofield won the BAFTA for Best Supporting Actor for the 1996 role, thirty years after taking an Oscar as Thomas More in A Man for All Seasons.

The Crucible's first Broadway production won which honour in 1953?

Tony Award for Best Play went to a staging that Arthur Miller himself found stylised and cold; a new production a year later succeeded, and the Salem drama became a classic.

Which annual October festival draws huge crowds of visitors to the city of Salem, Massachusetts?

Haunted Happenings fills the city every autumn, when more than a million visitors have been counted in peak periods, making a colonial tragedy the engine of the local economy.

Which town saw over 40 residents accused after Salem Village's afflicted girls were invited there?

Andover's troubles began when a resident asked the girls to say who was making his wife ill; three people from the town were hanged and several more were condemned.

Mercy Lewis, a Salem accuser orphaned by frontier raids, was born in which present-day state?

Maine was a war zone when Lewis was a child: born at Falmouth on Casco Bay, she lost her parents in a raid in 1689 and went into service as a 14-year-old.

Folk healer Roger Toothaker, who died in jail as a Salem suspect, had boasted of which speciality?

Detecting witches and punishing them was his claimed trade, and he bragged that his daughter had killed one; his accusers included the servant of a rival physician.

Thomas Brattle, who mocked the Salem trials in a 1692 letter, became treasurer of which college?

Harvard made the merchant and astronomer its treasurer in 1693, a post he held for twenty years; his letter is still studied as a reasoned attack on the court.

Sixteen years before the Salem trials, Giles Corey was tried and fined for which violent act?

Beating a farmhand to death with a stick over stolen apples brought only a fine, because masters were allowed to strike indentured servants; neighbours suspected a bribe.

Sarah Wildes, hanged in July 1692, lived in which town that had beaten Salem in border disputes?

Topsfield employed her husband as its surveyor, which put the family on the wrong side of the land quarrels; her son Ephraim was the town's constable during the hunt.

Which Amesbury widow, hanged at Salem in July 1692, laughed out loud at her accusers' fits in court?

Susannah Martin told a shocked magistrate that she might well laugh at such folly; she had already faced one witchcraft accusation, dismissed by a higher court, around 1669.

Which Guadeloupean novelist wrote the 1986 novel I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem?

Maryse Condé won France's Grand Prix for women's literature with the book, which reached English readers in 1992 with a foreword by the activist Angela Davis.

A 1957 Massachusetts act meant to clear six hanged Salem women named only which one of them?

Ann Pudeator owed the mention to Lee Greenslit, a Midwestern textbook publisher who found her while tracing his family; the other five waited until 2001 to be named.

Salem's judges leaned on the precedent of a famous 1662 witch trial held in which English town?

Bury St Edmunds saw two Lowestoft women condemned by one of England's most respected judges, and a printed account of the case was consulted by the court in Massachusetts.

Thomas Maule, jailed for a 1695 book attacking the Salem trials, belonged to which religious group?

Quakers such as Maule were outsiders in Massachusetts; he argued it was better that a hundred witches should live than that one innocent person die, and a jury finally acquitted him.