She did torment me grievously, urging me to write in the book; and when I refused, she pinched me with invisible hands.
— Deposition of Mercy Lewis, taken the 29th day of March, 1692
A Quiet Village, Suddenly Unquiet
On the strange afflictions that began in the parsonage
It began, by most accounts, in the kitchen of the Reverend Samuel Parris — a small frame house in Salem Village, Massachusetts Bay Colony, in the late winter of 1692. His daughter Betty, nine years old, and his niece Abigail Williams, eleven, fell into fits that the local physician, William Griggs, could not name. They contorted, they screamed at unseen tormentors, they crawled beneath benches and complained of pinches upon their flesh. Griggs, after consultation, returned a verdict that would set the next ten months in motion: the Evil Hand is upon them.
What followed was less a single trial than an unspooling. By summer, more than one hundred fifty men, women, and children stood accused. Magistrates rode in from Boston. Hangings were scheduled at Proctor's Ledge. The records that survive — depositions, examinations, warrants, and the occasional plea of innocence written in a steady, careful hand — form one of the most thoroughly documented episodes of mass accusation in the colonial record.
This archive does not seek to sensationalize. It seeks only to set the testimony down again, in a form a present-day reader might examine quietly, as one would leaf through papers in a museum reading room.
An Examination, Recorded Verbatim
Court of Oyer and Terminer, the second day of June
The accused, Bridget Bishop, was brought before the bar a little after the morning bell. She was a woman of middle years, twice widowed, the keeper of a small unlicensed tavern where, it was alleged, the young men of the village played at shovel-board past curfew. She wore, by the marshal's note, a paragon bodice of red, which several witnesses would later cite as evidence in itself.
Magistrate Hathorne began as he always began, with the question that admitted no good answer: Bishop, what do you say? You here stand charged with sundry acts of witchcraft. What do you say to it? She replied, in a steady voice the clerk took pains to record, that she was as innocent as the child unborn. The afflicted girls, ranged on a bench at her left, immediately fell into fits, and one cried out that the shape of Bishop had bitten her on the wrist not three nights past.
A note in the margin, in a different hand, reads simply: The marks were shown to the court, and did agree with the teeth of the accused. Whether this was determination or invention, the record does not say. Bishop was the first to hang, on the tenth of June, on a bare ledge above the town — the ledge that would hold the gallows for nineteen others before the autumn was through.
- Examination transcript, Essex County Archives, vol. I, fol. 32r. The original spelling has been modernized for readability; the substance is unchanged.
- Bishop's red bodice is mentioned in three independent depositions as a token of "vain and wanton" character. No charge of witchcraft on the basis of dress was ever formally entered.
A Slow Quieting
By October the magistrates themselves had begun to doubt. Spectral evidence — the testimony that an accuser had been afflicted by the invisible shape of the accused — was struck down by Governor Phips on the advice of the Boston ministers, who had grown uneasy at what their colleagues in Salem had wrought. The Court of Oyer and Terminer was dissolved; its successor refused to convict on shape evidence alone. The remaining accused were, one by one, released.
In January of 1697, Samuel Sewall, the only one of the magistrates ever to recant, stood in the South Church of Boston while his minister read aloud a confession of error and shame. He bowed his head; the congregation said nothing; the minister continued the service. The record notes only that the day was very cold, and the meeting-house unheated.
We walked in clouds, and could not see our way.
— Rev. John Hale, A Modest Inquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft, 1702