Salem Witch Trials Begin: Paranoia Consumes a Town

Bridget Bishop was hanged from an oak tree at Gallows Hill in Salem, Massachusetts, on June 10, 1692, the first person executed in the Salem witch trials. She had been convicted of "certaine Detestable Arts called Witchcraft and Sorceries" after five young women claimed that her specter tormented them with pinches, bites, and chokings invisible to anyone else. Bishop denied everything. The court accepted the spectral evidence. She was dead before noon. Bishop had been a target long before the hysteria began. A twice-widowed tavern owner who wore a distinctive black cap and a red bodice, she had been accused of witchcraft in 1680 but acquitted. She was outspoken, quarreled publicly with her neighbors, and operated an establishment where people drank and played shuffleboard, behavior that offended Puritan sensibilities. When the accusations resurfaced in 1692, testimony from a dozen witnesses described ghostly visitations, enchanted poppets found in the walls of her former home, and farm animals that died mysteriously after she walked past. The Salem panic had begun in January 1692 when two young girls in the household of Reverend Samuel Parris began having fits, screaming, contorting their bodies, and accusing local women of bewitching them. The accusations spread rapidly. By June, over seventy people had been arrested. The newly established Court of Oyer and Terminer, presided over by Chief Justice William Stoughton, accepted spectral evidence as proof of guilt, meaning that a witness’s claim to have seen a defendant’s ghostly shape was treated as fact. Between June and September 1692, nineteen people were hanged and one was pressed to death with heavy stones for refusing to enter a plea. Over 150 were imprisoned. The trials ended when Governor William Phips dissolved the court in October, partly because his own wife had been accused. By 1697, several jurors and accusers had publicly recanted, and the Massachusetts General Court declared the trials unlawful. Bishop and the other victims were not formally exonerated until 2001, three centuries after they were killed by a legal system that mistook fear for evidence.