Salem

Between February 1692 and May 1693, the Salem witch trials resulted in the deaths of twenty-five people: nineteen hanged after conviction for witchcraft, one man pressed to death under stones for refusing to enter a plea, and at least five who died in jail awaiting trial. The episode began when several young girls in Salem Village (now Danvers) began experiencing fits that a local doctor attributed to supernatural causes; accusations spread rapidly amid existing tensions over property disputes, religious factionalism, and the recent trauma of frontier wars with Indigenous nations and France. Spectral evidence — testimony that a person's apparition had appeared to torment the witness — was admitted as proof, a practice that colonial courts later repudiated.

Within a year, the colonial government had dissolved the special court, halted prosecutions, and Massachusetts ultimately reversed the convictions; one of the presiding judges, Samuel Sewall, publicly confessed guilt and asked forgiveness in 1697. Modern explanations proposed for the initial fits have included ergot poisoning from contaminated rye (a hypothesis first advanced in 1976 and since contested), encephalitis, and conventional psychological explanations of social panic. Salem has since embraced its history as both a cautionary tale and a tourism identity, hosting witch-themed museums, walking tours, and an annual Halloween festival drawn to the very events the town once sought to forget.