The Witch

The Salem Witch Trials of 1692 unfolded in the Massachusetts Bay Colony between February 1692 and May 1693, producing one of the most notorious miscarriages of justice in American history. The crisis began in Salem Village (now Danvers) when nine-year-old Betty Parris and 11-year-old Abigail Williams, the daughter and niece of Reverend Samuel Parris, began suffering violent contortions, screaming fits, and complaints of being pinched and pricked by invisible tormentors. A local physician, unable to diagnose a medical cause, suggested bewitchment. Under pressure, the girls named three initial suspects: Tituba, an enslaved woman in the Parris household; Sarah Good, a destitute beggar; and Sarah Osborne, an elderly woman estranged from the community. Tituba’s dramatic confession, in which she described flying through the air and signing the devil’s book, ignited a panic that spread across Essex County.

The newly arrived Governor William Phips established the Court of Oyer and Terminer in May 1692 to hear the mounting cases. By the time the court was dissolved and replaced in October, more than 200 people had been accused, and 19 had been hanged on Gallows Hill after being convicted as witches. One man, Giles Corey, had been pressed to death with stones for refusing to enter a plea, and at least five others had perished in jail. The accused came disproportionately from marginal groups: women (especially those who were widowed, propertied, outspoken, or quarrelsome), the poor, and those entangled in long-standing village disputes. Historian Mary Beth Norton has argued that the panic cannot be separated from the trauma of King William’s War on the Maine frontier, which flooded Essex County with refugees and primed the community to see diabolical conspiracy everywhere (Norton, Mary Beth. In the Devil’s Snare: The Salem Witchcraft Crisis of 1692. Alfred A. Knopf, 2002).

The trials became infamous for evidentiary standards that effectively guaranteed conviction. Chief among these was “spectral evidence,” which USLegal.com defines as “testimony that the accused person’s spirit or spectral shape appeared” to a witness (“Spectral Evidence Law and Legal Definition.” USLegal). Because a specter couldn’t be cross-examined and its appearance couldn’t be disproved, the accused had virtually no means of defense. Magistrates also relied on the “touch test,” in which a fit would allegedly cease when the afflicted was touched by the witch. Physical examinations searched for a “witch’s teat”—any unusual mole, wart, or blemish interpreted as the devil’s mark. Confessions, often extracted under coercion, were rewarded with reprieve, while maintaining innocence frequently led to the gallows. Increase Mather’s Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits (1693) finally helped turn elite opinion against spectral evidence, famously declaring it “were better that ten suspected witches should escape, than that one innocent person should be condemned” (Mather, Increase. Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits. Benjamin Harris, 1693). In The Witch, Caroline Eldridge’s 1692 trial reproduces the procedures of the witch trials. Jonas Reeve warns her that Magistrate Putman “will accept spectral evidence” (152), a premonition that proves true. Deputy Strickland and Sheriff Bixby subject her to the search for the devil’s mark, identifying a burn on her arm as proof of guilt, and Strickland pricks it with a blunted needle to “prove” it will not bleed—turning her trial into a scripted performance of manufactured guilt rather than any pursuit of justice.

Salem’s hold on American literature has proved extraordinarily durable, in part because the trials offer a ready-made allegory for persecution, mass hysteria, and the policing of women who refuse to conform. Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose great-great-grandfather John Hathorne was a presiding magistrate at the trials, added the “w” to his surname partly to distance himself from that inheritance, and the shadow of Salem falls across The Scarlet Letter (1850) and “Young Goodman Brown” (1835). Arthur Miller’s The Crucible (1953) famously reworked the trials as a parable of McCarthyism, cementing their place in the national imagination. A substantial contemporary tradition uses Salem as a point of departure for interrogating women’s lives across American history: Maryse Condé’s I, Tituba, Black Witch of Salem (1992) recovers the voice of the enslaved Caribbean woman at the panic’s origin; Katherine Howe’s The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (2009) braids a graduate student’s research with the fate of a convicted “cunning woman”; Stacy Schiff’s narrative history The Witches: Salem, 1692 (2015) foregrounds the adolescent girls who drove the accusations; Alice Hoffman’s The Rules of Magic (2017) traces a lineage of women descended from a Salem survivor; and Brunonia Barry’s The Lace Reader (2006) transplants the inheritance of accusation into contemporary Salem itself. The Witch takes its place in this continuum, using Caroline’s trial and Julia’s modern reckoning to examine how the suspicion once leveled at women in 1692 continues to shape their female descendants.