48 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.