The Salem witch trials are the most retold witch story in the Western world, and most of what gets repeated about them is wrong. With Halloween nine days away, this is a good time to set out what the historical record actually supports, and what it asks of people who practise witchcraft today.
The Salem witch trials in brief
The episode ran from February 1692 to May 1693 in colonial Massachusetts. Girls in Salem Village began having fits in early 1692, and the first three people accused, Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne and an enslaved woman named Tituba, were examined from 1 March. Britannica dates the trials as June 1692 to May 1693, which marks the period of the special court.
Governor William Phips ordered a Court of Oyer and Terminer on 27 May 1692. It first sat on 2 June with William Stoughton as chief magistrate, and Bridget Bishop was hanged on 10 June, the first of the executions.
The numbers, as best they can be checked
More than 200 people were accused. Thirty were convicted, and nineteen of those were hanged: fourteen women and five men. Giles Corey, an elderly farmer, refused to enter a plea and died under torture. At least five more people died in the disease-ridden jails without ever going to trial.
Those figures vary slightly between sources, because surviving records are incomplete and accusations spread across many towns. Treat any single tidy number with some caution.
Myths worth dropping
Nobody was burned at Salem. English colonial law dealt with witchcraft as a felony, and those executed were hanged. The burning image comes from continental European history and from later fiction.
The accused were also not practising pagans. The records show neighbours, church members and people already in quarrels with their accusers. Many went to their deaths insisting on their innocence as Christians. Reading them as secret witches erases what happened to them.
Tituba is often described with confident claims about her origins. Historians disagree about her ancestry, and the honest position is that it is uncertain. She is better understood as an enslaved woman under enormous pressure whose confession was shaped by that pressure.
Why spectral evidence mattered
The trials leaned heavily on spectral evidence, meaning testimony that a person’s spirit or shape had appeared to the afflicted and tormented them. It could not be seen by anyone else, and it could not be disproved. Cotton Mather wrote on 31 May 1692 advising the court to be cautious about relying on it, and the ministers’ reply on 15 June said it should not be enough for conviction by itself. The executions continued anyway.
The mechanism is the useful lesson. An accusation that cannot be tested turns every denial into more evidence, and fear, local feuds and the wish to be believed do the rest.
What caused the fits?
Theories include convulsive ergot poisoning, which was proposed in the 1970s, along with other medical explanations and social ones such as property disputes and factional church politics. None is settled. Ergot in particular remains a hypothesis, and it does not account for the accusations spreading through courtrooms and neighbourhoods. A mix of causes is the safest reading.
How the story ended
The Massachusetts General Court declared the trials unlawful in 1702. In 1711 the colonial legislature annulled the convictions of 22 named people. Later acts in 1957 and 2001 cleared further names, and in 2022 Elizabeth Johnson Jr., the last convicted person still not formally cleared, was officially exonerated, 329 years after her conviction.
What it means for practitioners today
Modern witchcraft is a different thing from what Salem’s accusers feared, and the victims were not part of any tradition we can claim. A respectful approach is to remember them as people, not costumes.
Practically, it helps to keep the history accurate when others bring it up. A few points carry the most weight: the dead were hanged, not burned; they were accused by neighbours; and the real hazard was a system that treated unprovable claims as proof. That is a useful awareness skill for any community, magical or not, because it shows how quickly suspicion can organise itself.
If you light a candle for the victims, a plain white candle on a heatproof dish, kept away from curtains, paper and pets and never left unattended, is enough. Writing the names of the nineteen who were hanged in your grimoire is another quiet option. Our guide to starting a grimoire covers how to keep one you will actually use.
Salem and Halloween down under
Halloween lands in spring in Australia, so the autumn imagery of Salem, with its bare trees and dark evenings, belongs to another season for us. Our post on why 31 October is really Beltane down here explains how the calendar swaps over, and the tour of witches in pop culture shows how Salem still shapes what screens show us.
Further reading
For a reliable overview, the Britannica entry on the Salem witch trials is a good starting point. Dates in this post were checked against Wikipedia’s summary of the primary record, and anything not independently verified has been left out.
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