Salem Witch Trials Trivia
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48 free Salem Witch Trials trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Sep 2026.
Between February 1692 and May 1693 more than 200 people in colonial Massachusetts were accused of witchcraft, nineteen were hanged and one man was pressed to death under stones. This quiz covers the whole story: the afflicted girls of Salem Village, the first three women accused, the Court of Oyer and Terminer and its reliance on spectral evidence, the executions on Proctor's Ledge, the ministers who fanned and then doused the panic, and the slow work of apology, reversal and exoneration that ran all the way to 2022. Easy questions ask which year it happened and who said "more weight"; harder ones cover the witch cake, the touch test, the £578 compensation and which judge publicly repented. It suits history students, readers of The Crucible, anyone planning a Halloween trip to Salem, and quiz nights that want an American history round with real bite. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia articles on the trials and the individual people involved, and each question shows its source once you have answered.
30 of 48 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Why did some acquitted Salem suspects stay locked up?
Unpaid jail fees
Unpaid jail fees kept them there; Tituba stayed locked up for some thirteen months until an unknown person paid them and took her.
Q 02What did Salem's accused lack at trial?
A defence lawyer
A defence lawyer was not allowed, so the accused had to defend themselves while their accusers writhed and screamed in the courtroom.
Q 03The accusations began in Salem Village, which is known today by what name?
Danvers
Danvers was then the farming village of Salem Village, which feuded with wealthier Salem Town, where the witch court actually sat.
Q 04What was the special court that tried the Salem witchcraft cases in 1692 called?
The Court of Oyer and Terminer
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.
Q 05Which girl was one of the first two in Salem Village to suffer mysterious fits in 1692?
Abigail Williams
Abigail Williams and her cousin Betty began having fits, and a local doctor who could find no physical cause blamed the supernatural.
Q 06Which of the first three women accused was elderly and had rarely attended church meetings?
Sarah Osborne
Sarah Osborne was also scorned for her romance with an indentured servant, whom she later married.
Q 07Tituba was enslaved by which Salem Village minister, whose daughter and niece were first afflicted?
Samuel Parris
Samuel Parris, a former merchant in Barbados, had divided the village well before the trials with his pay demands and his strict preaching.
Q 08Why was Tituba pivotal to the trials?
She confessed to witchcraft when examined
She confessed to witchcraft when examined, and her claim that other witches were at work alongside her set off a hunt for more.
Q 09The 1692 'witch cake' was made from rye meal and what, then fed to a dog?
Urine from the afflicted girls
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.
Q 10Who was the first person executed in the Salem witch trials, hanged on 10 June 1692?
Bridget Bishop
Bridget Bishop had already been accused of witchcraft years earlier and acquitted, but in 1692 she was convicted and hanged within eight days.
Q 11How did Giles Corey die in September 1692?
He was pressed to death under heavy stones
He refused to enter a plea, so the court used peine forte et dure to try to force one out of him.
Q 12Which frail 71-year-old was hanged on 19 July 1692 despite a jury first finding her not guilty?
Rebecca Nurse
Rebecca Nurse was excommunicated before she hanged, and family tradition holds that her body was buried in an unmarked grave on the family land.
Q 13Which former Salem Village minister was hanged in 1692 despite reciting the Lord's Prayer flawlessly?
George Burroughs
Q 21Asking nothing for herself, how did Mary Eastey urge judges to test her accusers?
Question them apart
Question them apart, she urged, to see whether their stories would still match, because she had seen her accusers' wiles at first hand.
Q 22On what grounds was Elizabeth Proctor spared execution after being convicted alongside her husband John?
She was pregnant
She was pregnant, so her execution was postponed, and by 1693 the hangings had ended and she was freed from jail.
Q 23Which Salem witch-trial magistrate was an ancestor of a famous American novelist?
John Hathorne
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.
Q 14Which small child was arrested in March 1692 and kept in jail for about eight months?
Dorothy Good
Dorothy Good, named Dorcas on her warrant, gave answers that magistrates took as a confession, and she was released on bond that December.
Q 15Why did Martha Corey fall under suspicion in 1692?
She had expressed scepticism about the girls' accusations
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.
Q 16What was "spectral evidence"?
Testimony that the accused's apparition had afflicted the witness
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.
Q 17Which Boston minister, author of Wonders of the Invisible World, published pamphlets asserting his belief in witchcraft?
Cotton Mather
Cotton Mather later led Boston's fight for smallpox inoculation, an idea he learned from Onesimus, an enslaved West African man in his household.
Q 18What usually happened to accused Salem witches who confessed?
They were spared the gallows
They were spared the gallows, a lesson the accused soon learned, while those who insisted on their innocence met harsher fates.
Q 19Which governor, just back from England in May 1692, set up the court that tried the Salem witches?
William Phips
William Phips also ended the crisis: by May 1693 he had pardoned everyone still held on witchcraft charges.
Q 20Which lieutenant governor presided over the witch court at Salem in 1692?
William Stoughton
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.
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.
Q 24Eighth-graders in which class campaigned until the last convicted Salem 'witch' was cleared in 2022?
Civics
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.
Q 25Which judge had his apology for the trials read to his Boston congregation on 14 January 1697?
Samuel Sewall
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.
Q 26Which afflicted Salem accuser publicly asked forgiveness on joining the church in 1706?
Ann Putnam Jr.
Ann Putnam Jr. blamed Satan for her accusations and begged forgiveness from the families whose relatives had been taken away.
Q 27What did Massachusetts grant Salem victims' families in 1711?
Cash compensation
Cash compensation, some £600 in all, went to survivors and relatives, along with laws restoring the good names of the condemned.
Q 28Several jurors who had condemned Salem's accused later apologized, saying they had been what?
Sadly deluded and mistaken
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'.
Q 29What did judge Nathaniel Saltonstall do after the witch court's first trial?
Resigned from the bench
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.
Q 30Which Salem site was confirmed in 2016 as the place where the 1692 hangings actually happened?
Proctor's Ledge
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.