Salem Witch Trials Timeline

In Salem Village in February 1692, Betty Parris (age 9) and her cousin Abigail Williams (age 11), daughter and niece of Reverend Samuel Parris, began to have fits described as beyond the power of epileptic fits or natural disease to effect by John Hale, minister of nearby Beverly.

Image source: Salem witch trials

Brought before the local magistrates on the complaint of witchcraft, the first accused were interrogated for several days starting March 1, 1692, then sent to jail. Until this point, all proceedings were investigative.

Later accounts, such as those by Upham in the 19th century, typically relate that a circle of girls, with Tituba's help, tried their hands at fortune telling. Thomas Hutchinson described her as a Spanish Indian. On March 25, 1692, Parris spoke privately with Sibley about her grand error and accepted her sorrowful confession.

Image source: Tituba

Sarah Osborne, one of the first three persons accused of witchcraft, died in jail on May 10, 1692, before she could be brought to trial.

On May 27, 1692, Governor William Phips ordered the establishment of a Special Court of Oyer and Terminer for Suffolk, Essex and Middlesex counties to prosecute the cases of those thronging the jails. One of the new governor and council's first orders of business was nominating county justices, sheriffs, and this court commission.

The Court of Oyer and Terminer convened in Salem Town on June 2, 1692, with William Stoughton as Chief Magistrate, Thomas Newton as Crown's Attorney, and Stephen Sewall as clerk. Bridget Bishop, the first person indicted and tried, was executed by hanging eight days later on June 10, 1692.

Image source: Bridget Bishop

Suspect Roger Toothaker died in prison on June 16, 1692, one of several accused who perished in custody before trial or execution could take place.

On July 19, 1692, five women were executed by hanging: Sarah Good, Rebecca Nurse, Susannah Martin, Elizabeth Howe, and Sarah Wildes.

On August 19, 1692, five more people were executed by hanging: Martha Carrier, John Willard, George Burroughs, George Jacobs Sr., and John Proctor. Burroughs was the former Salem Village minister arrested at the height of the hysteria.

On September 19, 1692, Giles Corey refused to plead at trial and was killed by peine forte et dure, a form of torture in which the subject is pressed beneath an increasingly heavy load of stones in an attempt to make him enter a plea.

Image source: Giles Corey

On September 22, 1692, eight more persons were executed by hanging: Mary Eastey, Martha Corey, Ann Pudeator, Samuel Wardwell, Mary Parker, Alice Parker, Wilmot Redd, and Margaret Scott. This was the final execution date of the trials.

The most famous primary source about the trials is Cotton Mather's Wonders of the Invisible World, printed in October 1692. It defended the trials and recounted the evidence against the condemned witches.

Image source: Wonders of the Invisible World

Cotton Mather's father, Increase Mather, completed Cases of Conscience Concerning Evil Spirits at the same time as Wonders and published it in November 1692. It included a copy of a letter questioning spectral evidence, helping turn opinion against the trials.

Image source: Blackstone's ratio

In January 1693, the new Superior Court of Judicature convened in Salem, again headed by William Stoughton as Chief Justice, with Anthony Checkley as Attorney General and Jonathan Elatson as Clerk. Its first five cases were people indicted but not tried in September, including Sarah Buckley and Margaret Jacobs.

Lydia Dustin died in jail on March 10, 1693. Although the last trial was held in May 1693, some accused continued to languish and die in prison.

The first indication that public calls for justice were not over occurred in 1695 when Thomas Maule, a noted Quaker, publicly criticized the handling of the trials by the Puritan leaders in Chapter 29 of his book Truth Held Forth and Maintained, stating it were better that one hundred witches should live than that one person be put to death for a witch who is not a witch.

On December 17, 1696, the General Court ruled there would be a fast day on January 14, 1697, referring to the late Tragedy raised among us by Satan and his Instruments. On that day, Samuel Sewall asked forgiveness for his role in the trials.

John Hale, a minister in Beverly present at many of the proceedings, completed his book A Modest Enquiry into the Nature of Witchcraft in 1697. It was not published until 1702, after his death, and perhaps in response to Calef's book.

Robert Calef could not get his critical account of the trials published in Boston and had to take it to London, where it was published in 1700, further undermining support for the trials and their defenders.

Image source: Robert Calef

Various petitions were filed between 1700 and 1703 with the Massachusetts government demanding that the convictions be formally reversed. In 1703 another petition requested a more equitable settlement for those wrongly accused, but no action was taken until 1709.

Rev. Joseph Green and the members of the church voted on February 14, 1703, after nearly two months of consideration, to reverse the excommunication of Martha Corey, who had been hanged as a witch in September 1692.

Image source: Martha Corey

On August 25, 1706, Ann Putnam Jr., one of the most active accusers, joined the Salem Village church and publicly asked forgiveness, admitting her role in the accusations. Several accusers, mostly teenage girls, admitted they had fabricated their charges.

In May 1709, 22 people who had been convicted of witchcraft, or whose relatives had been convicted, presented the government with a petition demanding both a reversal of attainder and compensation for financial losses.

On October 17, 1711, the General Court passed a bill reversing the judgment against the twenty-two people listed in the 1709 petition. Seven additional people had been convicted but had not signed the petition, and no reversal of attainder was issued for them.

Two months after the reversal bill, on December 17, 1711, Governor Joseph Dudley authorized monetary compensation of £578 12s to be divided among the survivors and relatives of those accused. Most accounts were settled within a year, but Phillip English's extensive claims were not settled until 1718.

Image source: Joseph Dudley

In 1957, descendants of six people wrongly convicted and executed but not included in the 1711 reversal demanded the General Court formally clear their names. An act passed by the Massachusetts legislature absolved the six people.

In November 2001, the Massachusetts legislature passed an act exonerating all who had been convicted and naming each of the innocent, except Elizabeth Johnson. When signed on October 31, 2001, by Governor Jane Swift, more than 300 years after the trials, all were finally proclaimed innocent.

As of 2004, there was still talk about exonerating or pardoning all of the victims of the trials, since some individuals remained without formal exoneration despite earlier legislative acts.

Elizabeth Johnson Jr., the last convicted Salem witch, was officially exonerated when the Massachusetts Senate cleared her name on May 26, 2022, 329 years after she had been found guilty, after pressure from schoolchildren who discovered the anomaly.

The story of the witchcraft accusations, trials and executions captured the imagination of writers and artists for centuries. Their earliest impactful use as the basis for popular fiction is the 1828 novel Rachel Dyer by John Neal.

Image source: Rachel Dyer

Rebecca Nurse's descendants erected an obelisk-shaped granite memorial in her memory in 1885 on the grounds of the Nurse Homestead in Danvers, with an inscription from poet John Greenleaf Whittier.

Image source: Rebecca Nurse

In 1892, an additional monument was erected at the Nurse Homestead in honor of forty neighbors who had signed a petition in support of Rebecca Nurse during the trials.

Land in the area was purchased by the city of Salem in 1936 and renamed Witch Memorial Land, but no memorial was constructed on the site, and the popular misconception persisted that the executions had occurred at the top of Gallows Hill.

The 300th anniversary of the trials was marked in 1992 in Salem and Danvers by a variety of events. A memorial park was dedicated in Salem with stone slab benches inserted in the stone wall for each of those executed in 1692, and a memorial was dedicated in Danvers. The Danvers Tercentennial Committee also persuaded the Massachusetts House of Representatives to issue a resolution honoring those who had died.

In January 2016, the University of Virginia announced its Gallows Hill Project team had determined the execution site in Salem where the nineteen witches had been hanged, ending centuries of uncertainty about the location.

The city of Salem, which owns the property at the confirmed execution site, dedicated the Proctor's Ledge Memorial to the victims there in 2017.