A few young girls in the Massachusetts…
1692 CE
A few young girls in the Massachusetts town of Salem, stimulated by voodoo tales told by a West Indian slave, Tituba, claim they are possessed by the devil and subsequently accuse three local women, including Tituba, of witchcraft.
As Tituba and other accused persons are pressured and consequently incriminate others in false confessions, public hysteria over the threat of witchcraft mounts throughout Massachusetts.
Civil magistrates, encouraged by the clergy, set up a special court in Salem to try those accused of practicing witchcraft, and Samuel Sewall, John Hathorne, and William Stoughton are chosen as the court's judges.
The jurors are drawn from church membership lists, the chained defendants have no counsel, and the evidence presented is largely “spectral”—testimony about voices or apparitions seen only by the witnesses.
In early June, Bridget Bishop is convicted.
Following a brief delay, during which several leading ministers advise the use of spectral evidence only with “exquisite caution,” twenyt-six more are convicted.
Nineteen persons, fourteen of them women, are executed, including Bridget Bishop.
Another man, Giles Corey, is tortured to death in an attempt to coerce a guilty plea from him by crushing him with rocks.
By September 22, when the jails overflow with prisoners (even royal governor William Phips's wife is implicated), the hysteria abates.
Cotton Mather delivers a sermon arguing against mass convictions and other clergymen openly question the uses of spectral evidence.
Governor Phips abruptly intervenes in October and frees all those in jail.
Subsequently, the jurors admit their errors and both Judge Sewall and Reverend John Hale, the chief witness against Bridget Bishop, publicly confess their culpability. (The Massachusetts General Court will later annul the witch trials' convictions and grant indemnities to the families of those who had been executed.)