Case No. — / Trial of the Unnamed

Witch
Trial

A digital memorial. Everything that moves here is borrowed from the dark — embers, fragments, the slow drift of names long unsaid.

Enter slowly. Read slower.

Chapter II — Salem, Massachusetts, 1692

A village convinces itself.

In the cold winter of 1692, two girls began to convulse. By the next summer, twenty people had been executed. Of those, fourteen were women. The court accepted spectral evidence — testimony that the accused's shape, invisible to all but the accuser, had performed a harm. No body was needed. No witness was needed. Only an outline of fear, drawn in the air.

By autumn, the colonial governor banned the practice. The trials ended. The bodies remained.

Ledger of names: Bridget Bishop. Sarah Good. Rebecca Nurse. Susannah Martin. Elizabeth Howe. Sarah Wildes. George Burroughs. John Proctor. George Jacobs Sr. John Willard. Martha Carrier. Alice Parker. Ann Pudeator. Mary Eastey. Mary Parker. Margaret Scott. Wilmott Redd. Samuel Wardwell. Martha Corey. Giles Corey.

Chapter III — On the form of testimony

A voice, then a verdict.

Trial records are written in the present tense. The deposition of a child becomes the official memory of an adult woman's last day. The court clerk transcribes a fit; the fit becomes evidence; the evidence becomes a sentence. A page becomes a death. A death becomes a name in a margin.

Read the margins. They were the only place uncertainty was allowed to survive.

Chapter IV — Glitches in the record

Records that refuse to settle.

Names are misspelled, then re-misspelled, then canonized in the misspelling. A witness recants and the recantation is filed beneath the original testimony, where no judge will look. Three centuries pass and the record continues to shift — one historian rehabilitates a victim, another argues she was guilty of something else. The page glitches.

Trust is a kind of light. It flickers. It does not stay on.

Chapter V — Memorial

The names drift up.

In the next minutes, names of people executed for witchcraft will rise slowly through this column. Most are European. Some are from the colonial Americas. Some are from courts whose languages we no longer fully speak. We recover what we can.

An incomplete list. There can be no complete one.