Painting by Tompkins H. Matteson, courtesy of the Peabody Essex Museum

In May of 1692, 80-year-old George Jacobs, toothless and leaning heavily upon two staffs, defended himself against the charge of witchcraft by a pack of girls he called the “Witch bitches.” Mercy Lewis claimed she had been “tortured afflicted pined consumed wasted and tormented” by him, while others accused him of sticking pins in their hands. His servant Sarah Churchill testified against him and, most tragically, his 16-year-old granddaughter Margaret. “You tax me for a wizard,” Jacobs scoffed. “You may as well tax me for a buzzard.” As he testified, the girls “fell into the most grievous fits and screetchings.”

Taken to prison, he was examined and found to have “the Devil’s mark,” a small growth where demons suckled. Most damningly, Jacobs faltered when asked to recite the Lord’s Prayer, a sure sign of allegiance to Satan. While he was in prison, Sarah Churchill confessed to a neighbor that her testimony was a lie; the magistrates dismissed her statement and she recanted her recantation. Margaret told the judges she had made up the charges “with my own vile wicked heart” in order to save her own life. Her grandfather forgave her and left her money in his will. One week later he was hanged. His son, George Jr., escaped from Salem and did not return until the witch hunt had ended.

Though most of those caught up in the Salem hysteria were women, the odds a person accused of witchcraft was male were 1 in 4.2. Of the 44 men accused, five were executed. One of these was John Proctor, who would become the hero of The Crucible, a play written by Arthur Miller in 1952 to expose the McCarthy witch hunt against communists. Proctor was a 60-year-old tavern owner who had suggested that the best way to treat the “afflicted girls” was to hold them at their spinning wheels until they got past all the nonsense. He disputed the legitimacy of the court in Salem and demanded his case be moved to Boston. He also challenged the admissibility of “spectral evidence,” testimony given based upon dreams and visions. Thirty-two of his neighbors testified that “he had lived a Christian life in his family and was ever ready to help such as stood in need,” but to no avail. He was hung with George Jacobs, Sr., Martha Carrier, George Burroughs, and John Willard on August 19, 1692. His third wife, Elizabeth, though convicted of witchcraft, “pled her belly” and was imprisoned awaiting the birth of her child.

George Burroughs, a former minister in Salem, was brought back from Maine to stand trial for witchcraft. Nineteen-year-old Mercy Lewis claimed that Burroughs had flown her to the top of a mountain and offered her all the kingdoms of the world if she would sign the Devil’s book. On Gallows Hill, Burroughs was able to recite the Lord’s Prayer perfectly. The crowd muttered and seemed ready to challenge the order of execution when Reverend Cotton Mather came forward, and assured them that “the Devil has often been transformed into an Angel of Light.” More than a century later, Nathanial Hawthorne, a descendant of Judge John Hathorne of the Salem trials (the novelist had added the “w” to his name to distance himself from his unsavory ancestor) depicted the scene in Main Street. Burroughs prays and the crowd murmurs; it looks as though the minister will escape his “martyr’s death.” "Ah no; for listen to the wise Cotton Mather, who as he sits there on his horse, speaks comfortable to the perplexed multitude, and tells them that all had been religiously and justly done, and that Satan's power shall this day receive its death-blow in New England.”

Though there is no evidence that Cotton Mather ever regretted his actions, one of the nine judges who took part in the prosecutions stood up in his pew at South Church in Boston in 1697 to “take the blame and shame” for his part in the trials. Judge Samuel Sewell publicly repented and begged the congregation to join him in praying for forgiveness from God. He later wrote the first anti-slavery tract. This little tidbit of American history became immortalized when it was included in Barron’s SAT Preparation.

Around the same time Sewell literally put on his hair shirt, twelve jurors confessed that they had been “sadly deluded and mistaken” and that “according to our present minds, we would none of us do such things again, on such grounds, for the whole world.” In 1706 Anne Putnam, one of the “afflicted girls” apologized for her actions, and five years later the Massachusetts legislature voted to compensate the affected families. In 1957, Massachusetts formally apologized for the events, and in 1992, at the 300th anniversary of the Salem witchcraft crisis, Holocaust survivor and Nobel Laureate Eli Weisel helped dedicate a memorial to the victims of the Salem witchcraft crisis.