Witch Trivia
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96 free Witch trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
44 free Witch trivia questions with answers. Witches have been feared, burned, worshipped and turned into sitcom stars, and this quiz covers the whole span. It moves from the Salem trials and the European witch hunts (Matthew Hopkins, the Pendle witches, the Malleus Maleficarum, the last executions) through folklore and literature (Baba Yaga's chicken-legged hut, Macbeth's Weird Sisters, Roald Dahl's Grand High Witch) to modern Wicca and the witches of pop culture: the Wizard of Oz, Bewitched, Hocus Pocus, Sabrina and Wicked. Easy questions cover things anyone knows from Halloween. Harder ones ask who was hanged first at Salem, what the witch cake was made of, how many were executed across Europe, what skyclad means, and where Wicked opened on Broadway. It suits a Halloween party, a history class or a spooky pub quiz round. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the trials, the folklore, Wicca and the films and shows, and each question carries its source.
30 of 96 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Doubts about which kind of evidence helped end the Salem witch trials?
Spectral evidence
Spectral evidence was testimony that a suspect's spirit had attacked the accuser, and Increase Mather's Cases of Conscience warned against relying on it.
Q 02Which Salem judge alone later publicly confessed his guilt?
Samuel Sewall
Samuel Sewall confessed after a run of family deaths, including a stillborn child, that he feared were God's punishment for the trials.
Q 03How did Giles Corey die during the Salem trials?
Pressed to death under stones
Giles Corey refused to enter a plea and was pressed to death under stones, a refusal said to have kept his estate from being seized.
Q 04Who was the first person tried and executed at Salem?
Bridget Bishop
Bridget Bishop had faced a witchcraft charge back in 1680 without being convicted, yet in 1692 she became the new court's first case.
Q 05Eighth-graders won a 2022 exoneration for which last convicted Salem witch?
Elizabeth Johnson Jr.
Elizabeth Johnson Jr. was sentenced to hang in 1693 but spared, and earlier bills clearing the accused had left her out.
Q 06What did the 'witch cake' baked at Salem to detect witchcraft contain?
Rye meal and victims' urine
Rye meal and victims' urine went into the cake, which neighbour Mary Sibley had fed to a dog to expose the witch; the afflicted girls soon named names.
Q 07The Malleus Maleficarum, the notorious witch-hunting manual, was written by which inquisitor?
Heinrich Kramer
Heinrich Kramer wrote it after the bishop of Brixen ordered him out of Innsbruck, where his witch trial had been suspended.
Q 08Which 1953 Arthur Miller play dramatised the Salem trials as a McCarthy-era allegory?
The Crucible
Arthur Miller's The Crucible opened on Broadway in January 1953, using the Salem trials as an allegory for the hunt for communists; Miller himself was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1956.
Q 09Which pope issued the 1484 bull Summis desiderantes affectibus against devil-worshippers?
Innocent VIII
Innocent VIII's bull confirmed inquisitors' powers against witches in German lands, and the Malleus Maleficarum later printed it at the front of the book.
Q 10Roughly how many people did early modern Europe execute for witchcraft, by historians' consensus?
About 50,000
About 50,000: economists later found the trials surged where Catholic and Protestant churches competed hardest for followers.
Q 11Which self-styled 'Witchfinder General' drove England's witch-hunting peak in 1644-47?
Matthew Hopkins
Matthew Hopkins toured East Anglia from Manningtree with John Stearne, and suspects in his care were kept awake for nights on end until they confessed.
Q 12Which king attended witch trials after storms hit his bridal voyage and wrote the manual Daemonologie?
James VI of Scotland
James VI of Scotland had accused witches examined in his presence, and they confessed to plotting to drown him at sea on his way home from Denmark.
Q 13The Pendle witches were tried in 1612 in which English county?
Lancashire
Q 21Which plant appears in old recipes for the flying ointment witches were said to use?
Belladonna
Belladonna, deadly nightshade, carries scopolamine, a drug that can work through the skin and cause delirium.
Q 22What older English word for a broom names the twiggy version witches ride?
Besom
Besom, from Old English besma, was the ordinary word for a broom before 'broom', named for the shrub, replaced it; the witch's besom is a bundle of birch twigs lashed to a hazel or ash handle.
Q 23Baba Yaga, the witch of Slavic folklore, lives in a hut that stands on what?
Chicken legs
Baba Yaga's hut turns on chicken legs, and she flies about in a mortar, driving it with a pestle and sweeping away her tracks with a broom.
Lancashire's Pendle trials leaned on nine-year-old Jennet Device, whose evidence helped send members of her own family to the gallows.
Q 14Anna Göldi, often called Europe's last person executed for witchcraft, died in 1782 in which country?
Switzerland
Anna Göldi, a maidservant accused of harming her employer's daughter, was beheaded in Glarus, Switzerland; Glarus declared her innocent in 2008.
Q 15Which French writer's 1862 book La Sorcière portrayed the witch as a rebel against feudal oppression?
Jules Michelet
Jules Michelet even claimed that Paracelsus, burning the old medical books, said all he knew he had learned from witches.
Q 16Which country executed a man for practising witchcraft and sorcery in 2014?
Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia beheaded Mohammed bin Bakr al-Alawi for sorcery in August 2014, though Amnesty has said Saudi law does not formally make sorcery a capital crime.
Q 17In English folk belief, what is a 'familiar'?
A demon in animal form
A demon in animal form, or imp, was said to suck a witch's blood, and searchers checked suspects' bodies for the teat it fed from.
Q 18Which modern religion did Gerald Gardner make public in 1954?
Wicca
Wicca: Gardner claimed that a coven of witches meeting in the New Forest had initiated him in 1939.
Q 19Modern witchcraft typically honours a Triple Goddess alongside which male deity?
The Horned God
The Horned God is said to be born of the Goddess at Yule, to die as the year wanes and to be born again the next Yule.
Q 20What word do modern witches use for practising rituals in the nude?
Skyclad
Skyclad means clothed only by the sky, and one 1899 witch gospel told followers to be naked in their rites as a sign that they were free.
Q 24Shakespeare based Macbeth's three witches on an account in which historian's Chronicles?
Raphael Holinshed
Raphael Holinshed's Chronicles made Banquo Macbeth's partner in killing the king, a role Shakespeare took away from him.
Q 25Which actress played the Wicked Witch of the West in the 1939 film?
Margaret Hamilton
Margaret Hamilton was burned on her face and hand during a take of her fiery exit from Munchkinland.
Q 26How does Dorothy accidentally destroy the Wicked Witch of the West?
She splashes her with a bucket of water
Dorothy ends the witch by accident: she splashes her with a bucket of water meant to douse the burning Scarecrow, and the witch melts away ('I'm melting!'); her guards, the Winkies, then hail Dorothy.
Q 27In the 1939 film, how does Glinda the Good Witch arrive?
In a bubble
In a bubble: Glinda floats into Munchkinland inside a glowing orb and leaves the same way after sending Dorothy down the Yellow Brick Road.
Q 28In Hocus Pocus, what is the surname of the three witches?
Sanderson
The Sanderson sisters, played by Bette Midler, Sarah Jessica Parker and Kathy Najimy, are hanged in colonial Salem and return when a black-flame candle is lit on Halloween.
Q 29What punishment do the Hocus Pocus witches inflict on Thackery Binx?
They turn him into an immortal black cat
They turn him into an immortal black cat, and three centuries later Thackery Binx helps Max and his little sister fight the witches.
Q 30Which streaming service released Hocus Pocus 2 in September 2022?
Disney+
Disney+ premiered it nearly three decades after the 1993 original, a box-office flop that grew into a cult Halloween favourite.