It was an unusually oppressive, cloudless summer morning in the village of Salem. At sunrise, five local women, ranging in age from 39 to 71, were brought to the town scaffolds and duly executed by hanging. The date of this infamous event was July 19, 1692, and the capital crimes for which they were convicted included blasphemous utterings and witchcraft.

The trials were not trivial events conducted in some provincial magistrate’s chambers nor held in some ad hoc tavern gathering; neither were they taken lightly. Lt. Gov. William Stoughton himself presided over the hearings. A special Court of Oyer and Terminer (French, meaning “hear and determine”), made up of seven judges, was convened to judge the validity of the charges. The court stayed in session from May 25 until it was dissolved on Oct. 29, 1692. In all, close to 350 towns-people were examined, over 150 Massachusetts citizens were formally imprisoned, five perished while in custody, 29 were convicted of the capital felony of diabolical acts including witchcraft and 18 (14 women and 4 men) were hanged and one man was crushed to death by court order. To display its innate compassion, though, the court stayed the executions of Elizabeth Proctor and Abigail Faulkner, since they were visibly pregnant.

Much of the evidence against the accused was deemed to be “spectral” in nature — that is, consisting solely of the testimony of the allegedly afflicted who said that they saw the apparitions of those afflicting them. The court accepted these claims as proof that the accused had been complicit with Satan.

The five women hanged on July 19 were: Sarah Wildes, Elizabeth Howe, Susannah Martin, Sarah Good and Rebecca Nurse.

On Oct. 3 that year, Increase Mather wrote a letter to the court stating: “It were better that ten suspected witches should escape, than one innocent person be condemned.”

Eight years later, John Hale, a minister from Beverly, Mass., wrote: “Such was the darkness of that day, the tortures and lamentations of the afflicted, and the power of former presidents, that we walked in the clouds, and could not see our way.”

But it was not until Oct. 31, 2001, that all of those convicted of witchcraft were finally proclaimed by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to be innocent.

—Stanley M. Aronson, M.D.