The Afflicted Girls of Salem

The winter of 1692 settled over Salem Village like a judgment. The small Puritan settlement in the Massachusetts Bay Colony—a cluster of farmsteads and meetinghouses separated from the more prosperous Salem Town by miles of frozen woodland—had long been a place of simmering tensions. Land disputes festered between families, political factions fought over the appointment of ministers, and the ever-present threat of Native American raids along the northern frontier kept the community in a state of chronic anxiety. Into this volatile atmosphere came a series of events that would consume the village, claim twenty lives, and leave a scar on the American conscience that has never fully healed. It began, as so many catastrophes do, with something small—a child who could not stop screaming.

The Parsonage

In January 1692, nine-year-old Betty Parris, daughter of the Reverend Samuel Parris, began to behave in ways that no one in Salem Village could explain. The girl threw herself to the floor in violent convulsions, her limbs twisting into positions that seemed anatomically impossible. She screamed without apparent cause, sometimes for hours. She crawled beneath furniture and hid in corners, whimpering about things that only she could see. She complained of being pinched and bitten by invisible hands, and when her clothing was examined, marks were found on her skin—red welts and bruises that appeared to have no natural origin.

Within days, her cousin Abigail Williams, eleven years old and also living in the Parris household, began exhibiting identical symptoms. Abigail’s fits were, if anything, more dramatic than Betty’s. She ran through the house flailing her arms, threw objects at walls, and screamed that spectral figures were tormenting her. During prayer services, both girls interrupted the proceedings with blood-curdling shrieks, their bodies going rigid or thrashing uncontrollably. Reverend Parris, a man already beset by professional difficulties and deeply unpopular with a significant faction of his congregation, was horrified. His household was supposed to be a model of Puritan piety. Instead, it had become a theater of apparent demonic activity.

The local physician, Dr. William Griggs, was summoned to examine the girls. After exhausting his knowledge of natural medicine, Griggs delivered the diagnosis that would set the crisis in motion: the girls were under an “Evil Hand.” In the theological framework of seventeenth-century New England, this meant one thing. Someone was practicing witchcraft against them.

The Contagion Spreads

The affliction did not remain confined to the Parris household. Over the following weeks, other young women in Salem Village began experiencing similar torments. Ann Putnam Jr., twelve years old and the daughter of one of the village’s most politically active families, fell into violent fits and reported seeing the specters of local women who came to her in the night, demanding that she sign the Devil’s book. Mercy Lewis, a seventeen-year-old servant in the Putnam household and a refugee from the devastating frontier attacks in Maine, joined the circle of the afflicted. Mary Walcott, Elizabeth Hubbard, and several others followed in rapid succession.

The pattern of their afflictions was remarkably consistent. The girls reported being visited by the spectral forms of their tormentors—shadowy figures who pinched them, choked them, stuck them with pins, and attempted to force them to sign a book that would pledge their souls to Satan. During their fits, the girls appeared to be in genuine agony, their bodies contorting, their screams filling whatever room they occupied. Between episodes, they were often lucid and articulate, able to describe their visions in vivid detail. This alternation between violent affliction and calm testimony would prove devastating in the months to come.

The community’s response was shaped by deeply held beliefs about the spiritual world. For Puritans, the Devil was not a metaphor but a living, active presence who sought to destroy God’s people through his human agents—witches. The wilderness of New England was understood to be Satan’s territory, and the Puritan settlements were outposts of godliness in a demonic landscape. The girls’ afflictions, in this worldview, were not symptoms of illness but evidence of a genuine spiritual assault. To deny this was to deny the reality of the Devil himself, and by extension, the reality of God.

The First Accusations

Under intense pressure from adults in their community—neighbors, ministers, magistrates—the afflicted girls began naming their tormentors. The first three women they accused were, in retrospect, tragically predictable choices. Tituba, an enslaved woman of South American or Caribbean origin in the Parris household, was a social outsider in every possible sense. Sarah Good was a homeless beggar whose muttered complaints after being turned away from doorsteps could easily be reinterpreted as curses. Sarah Osborne was an elderly woman who had scandalized the community by marrying her indentured servant and who rarely attended church services.

The arrests came on February 29, 1692, and the examinations began the following day. What happened in the Salem Village meetinghouse during those initial proceedings set the template for all that followed. As each accused woman was brought before the magistrates, the afflicted girls erupted into fits. When Sarah Good looked toward them, they screamed that her specter was attacking them. When the magistrates asked the girls who tormented them, they pointed at the accused with trembling fingers and cried out their names.

Tituba’s examination proved the most consequential. Whether motivated by fear, coercion, or some complex calculation of survival, Tituba confessed. She described riding through the air on a pole, seeing a tall man from Boston who showed her a book with nine marks in it, and encountering strange creatures—a hog, a great black dog, a red cat and a black cat—that served the Devil. Most critically, she confirmed that there were other witches in Salem Village, witches whose identities she did not fully know. This confession transformed the crisis from an isolated incident into an open-ended conspiracy. If there were unnamed witches still at large, the hunt could not stop.

The Machinery of Accusation

Through March, April, and May of 1692, the accusations expanded with terrifying momentum. The afflicted girls—who now numbered close to a dozen, with additional accusers joining as the crisis deepened—named suspect after suspect. The social profile of the accused began to shift. Where the first three women had been marginal figures, subsequent accusations reached into the respectable heart of the community. Martha Corey, a full church member, was accused. Rebecca Nurse, a seventy-one-year-old grandmother widely regarded as one of the most pious women in the village, was arrested. Even a former minister of Salem Village, George Burroughs, was named as the ringleader of the witch conspiracy.

The mechanism by which accusations were produced was grimly effective. The afflicted girls attended the examinations of the accused, where they performed their torments for the magistrates. When an accused person moved their hand, the girls screamed that they were being struck. When the accused shifted their gaze, the girls fell to the floor as if knocked down by an invisible force. If the accused bit their lip in anxiety, the girls displayed bite marks on their own arms. This was spectral evidence—the doctrine that the Devil could send the specter of a witch to torment victims at a distance—and it was virtually impossible to refute. How could anyone prove that their spectral form had not visited the girls in the night?

The girls also fell into trances during which they reported seeing visions of murdered people—ghosts who appeared to them and identified their killers as the accused witches. These ghostly testimonies added the charge of murder to the charge of witchcraft, raising the stakes immeasurably. The afflicted girls had become, in effect, the primary witnesses in capital cases, their visions and fits treated as evidence in proceedings where the penalty was death.

The Court of Oyer and Terminer

In late May 1692, the newly arrived Royal Governor, Sir William Phips, established a special Court of Oyer and Terminer to hear the witchcraft cases. The court was presided over by Chief Justice William Stoughton, a rigid and uncompromising figure who would prove deeply committed to prosecuting the accused. The first trial was that of Bridget Bishop, a woman whose colorful personal life and alleged involvement in a previous witchcraft complaint made her a convenient first defendant. She was convicted on June 2 and hanged on June 10.

Over the summer months, the court proceeded with relentless efficiency. Five more people were hanged on July 19, including Rebecca Nurse, whose conviction stunned many in the community who had believed her piety would protect her. Five more were executed on August 19, among them George Burroughs, who recited the Lord’s Prayer flawlessly at the gallows—a feat supposedly impossible for a witch—causing murmurs of doubt in the watching crowd. On September 22, eight more were hanged, including Martha Corey, whose husband Giles had been pressed to death three days earlier under heavy stones when he refused to enter a plea.

Throughout these proceedings, the afflicted girls remained the prosecution’s most powerful weapon. Their courtroom performances were extraordinary in their intensity and coordination. When an accused witch was brought into the room, the girls writhed and screamed in apparent agony. They displayed marks and wounds that appeared spontaneously on their flesh. They fell into rigid trances from which they could not be roused. The judges, confronted with such dramatic evidence of supernatural torment, found it difficult to acquit. In total, twenty people were executed—nineteen by hanging and one by pressing. At least five more died in the overcrowded, disease-ridden jails.

Doubt and Dissolution

Even as the executions continued, voices of dissent were growing louder. Increase Mather, one of the most influential ministers in Massachusetts and father of Cotton Mather, published a treatise arguing that spectral evidence was unreliable—the Devil, he reasoned, could assume the form of an innocent person without their knowledge or consent. If this was true, then the afflicted girls’ visions proved nothing about the guilt of the accused. Other ministers echoed his concerns. Merchants in Boston and Salem Town worried about the disruption to commerce and the colony’s reputation. Even some of the original accusers began to waver in their certainty.

Governor Phips, who had been absent fighting in Maine during much of the crisis, returned to find that the accusations had reached into his own social circle—his wife, Lady Phips, had been named by one of the afflicted. In October 1692, Phips dissolved the Court of Oyer and Terminer and established a new Superior Court with instructions that spectral evidence would no longer be admissible. Without the girls’ visions and fits as evidence, convictions became nearly impossible. The remaining accused were gradually released, the last of them walking free in May 1693.

The afflicted girls themselves largely disappeared from the historical record after the trials ended. Some married and lived quiet lives in surrounding communities. Ann Putnam Jr. remained in Salem Village, and in 1706, she stood before the congregation and offered a public apology, claiming she had been deluded by the Devil into accusing innocent people. She expressed particular sorrow for her role in the death of Rebecca Nurse and her family members. It was the only public apology ever offered by any of the afflicted, and its sincerity has been debated ever since.

The Nature of the Affliction

What actually happened to the girls of Salem Village remains one of the most debated questions in American history. The explanations proposed over the centuries say as much about the eras that produced them as they do about the events of 1692.

The Puritans themselves had no doubt that the girls were genuinely tormented by supernatural forces, though they disagreed about whether the Devil was acting through actual witches or deceiving the community by using the specters of innocent people. This theological debate ultimately helped end the crisis, but neither side questioned the reality of the girls’ suffering.

Later generations proposed medical explanations. In 1976, researcher Linnda Caporael suggested that the girls’ symptoms could have been caused by ergotism—poisoning from ergot fungus that grows on rye grain in warm, damp conditions. Ergot contains compounds related to LSD and can cause convulsions, hallucinations, and the sensation of being pinched or bitten. Salem Village grew rye, and the weather conditions of 1691 were conducive to ergot growth. The theory gained significant attention, though critics pointed out that ergotism typically produces additional symptoms—gangrene, for instance—that were not reported in Salem.

Psychological explanations have gained particular traction in modern scholarship. The girls lived in a culture of extreme repression, where emotional expression was tightly controlled, where children were expected to behave as miniature adults, and where the weight of Calvinist theology pressed heavily on every conscience. Their afflictions may have begun as genuine psychological episodes—perhaps conversion disorder, in which emotional distress manifests as physical symptoms—that were then reinforced and shaped by the intense attention and power they brought. Girls who had been invisible in their community suddenly found themselves at its very center, consulted by magistrates, feared by adults, and wielding a terrible authority over life and death.

The social dynamics of the crisis also deserve consideration. Many of the accusers came from families aligned with one political faction in Salem Village, while many of the accused were connected to the opposing faction. The witchcraft crisis, in this reading, was partly a proxy war fought through supernatural accusation, with the afflicted girls serving as weapons in a conflict they may not have fully understood but whose battle lines they had absorbed from their elders.

A Wound That Never Healed

The Salem witch trials left a permanent mark on the American consciousness. They became the archetypal cautionary tale about mass hysteria, the dangers of unchecked authority, and the catastrophic consequences of allowing fear to override reason and justice. The term “witch hunt” entered the English language as a metaphor for any campaign of persecution driven by paranoia rather than evidence, most famously invoked by Arthur Miller in his 1953 play The Crucible, which used Salem as an allegory for the McCarthy-era Red Scare.

The village of Salem itself was haunted by the events for generations. Families of the executed carried their grief and outrage forward, demanding official acknowledgment and restitution. It was not until 1711 that the Massachusetts colonial legislature passed a bill restoring the good names of most of the accused and providing financial compensation to their heirs. Even then, some names were not cleared until 1957, and the last accused—Elizabeth Johnson Jr.—was not formally exonerated until 2022, three hundred and thirty years after her conviction.

The sites associated with the trials remain places of pilgrimage and unease. The Rebecca Nurse Homestead in Danvers—the modern name for Salem Village—still stands, a weathered saltbox house surrounded by quiet fields. Visitors report a profound sense of sorrow at the property, a heaviness that seems to cling to the land itself. Gallows Hill, the probable execution site, carries a similar atmosphere, a weight that transcends ordinary sadness. Whether these sensations represent genuine spiritual residue or simply the power of historical knowledge to color perception, they testify to the enduring impact of what happened in that terrible year.

The afflicted girls of Salem remain figures of profound ambiguity—victims, perpetrators, or both, depending on which interpretation one accepts. They were children and adolescents living in a world that offered them no power, no voice, and no agency, until something happened in the Parris parsonage that gave them all three. Whatever force seized them that January—demonic, fungal, psychological, or social—it unleashed consequences that no one could control and that no one, in the end, could fully explain. Their screams echoed through the meetinghouses and courtrooms of colonial Massachusetts, and in some sense, they echo still.

Sources

• Wikipedia search: “The Afflicted Girls of Salem”
• Internet Archive — Historical demonology — Primary sources on possession accounts
• JSTOR — Religious studies — Peer-reviewed research on possession and exorcism