Witch Trials: Beyond Salem

I first became interested in the Salem witch trials long before I was interested in witchcraft itself. I remember reading about them as a child, and being fascinated by the tales of these girls my own age who had been possessed, taken by spirits in the night in league with the Devil himself. Accusations flew about like gray specters in the dark nights of colonial Massachusetts, fingers pointing, and no one was safe.

As I got older, and became more interested in history itself — not just of Salem and its trials, but of the entire country and in particular, the pre-Revolutionary American world — I read more and learned more. Among the many things I learned, first and foremost, was that none of the people tried for witchcraft in Salem were actually practicing witchcraft. Nine-year-old me had been certain they were, but adult me discovered this wasn’t the case at all.

What a lot of people are completely unaware of, though, and something I didn’t know about until I stumbled across it completely by accident, is that there was another trial in New England, three decades before Salem happened. In 1662, there was a situation very similar to the 1692 events, albeit on a smaller scale. The town of Hartford, Connecticut, saw a spring panic, the death of a child, and accusations pitting neighbor vs. neighbor, which I’ve written about in more detail here. Unlike Salem, however, only four people died in the Hartford trials.

One thing that’s on my bucket list of things to do some day is perhaps teach a class on witchcraft trials in the British Empire, and that would include Salem and Hartford. Now, this is the part where I usually get an indignant message from someone reminding me that Massachusetts and Connecticut are in ‘Murica, damn it! Well, sure… they are NOW. But in the 17th century, when these trials took place, America didn’t exist yet. Massachusetts and Connecticut were governed by British law, because they were (waaaait for it…) British colonies. Pardon me while I mic drop a bit.

Anyway, we all know about Salem and only a few of us have apparently even heard of Hartford, but Britain itself certainly has its share of witchcraft trials. One of the most notorious took place in Lancashire in 1612, in the Pendle Hill area, and ten people were eventually found guilty and sentenced to death by hanging.

One of the absolute most important takeaways when we look at trials like Salem, Hartford, and Pendle Hill, is that it is EXTREMELY unlikely that anyone who was convicted and hanged was actually practicing witchcraft. Every year — oddly, in the spring — there seems to be a resurgence of memes within the Pagan internet world honoring the “dead witches of Salem” or something along those lines. Honor them if you want, but they weren’t witches. In fact, many of them were very pious and devout Christians. We in the Pagan community can hardly hold up Salem as an example of anti-Pagan religious persecution — it was a total disaster, for sure, but had nothing to do with Actual Pagans™.

I had an awesome professor my last semester of college, who regularly pointed out that it’s not so much that history repeats itself, but that people themselves never change. Given the same circumstances, human behavior will tend towards repetition, whether we’re looking at ancient Rome, Asia, the British isles, or colonial Massachusetts. So read up, folks — read up on the conditions that can surround mass hysteria and panic, observe how people responded at the time, and then consider whether or not it can happen again.

For additional stuff to read, which includes references to academic work that’s invaluable, check out a couple of my articles here:

• Before Salem: The Hartford Witch Trials
• The Salem Witch Trials: Facts and History
• 5 Things About Salem You May Not Know
• The Witches of Pendle Hill
• By Sorcery, Charm, or Enchantment (aka my Senior Thesis paper)