Salem was divided into a prosperous town second only to Boston and a farming village. The two bickered again and again. The villagers, in turn, were split into factions that fiercely debated whether to seek ecclesiastical and political independence from the town. To understand the events of the Salem witch trials, it is necessary to examine the times in which accusations of witchcraft occurred. There were the ordinary stresses of 17th-century life in Massachusetts Bay Colony.

A strong belief in the devil, factions among Salem Village fanatics and rivalry with nearby Salem Town, a recent small pox epidemic and the threat of attack by warring tribes created a fertile ground for fear and suspicion.

In 1688, after a quarrel between two women called Glower and Goodwin, the child of the latter attending to the violent scene falled in convulsions. Glower, a catholic irish was charged of witchcraft and executed.

In 1689 the villagers won the right to establish their own church and chose the Reverend Samuel Parris, a former merchant, as their minister. His rigid ways and seemingly boundless demands for compensation made him impopular. Many villagers vowed to drive Parris out, and they stopped contributing to his salary in October 1691.

Seeking release from the tension choking their family, Parris’s nine-year-old daughter, Betty, and her cousin Abigail Williams delighted in the mesmerizing tales spun by Tituba, a slave from Barbados. The girls invited several friends to share this delicious, forbidden diversion. Tituba’s audience listened intently as she talked of telling the future.

In January of 1692, the daughter and niece of Reverend Samuel Parris of Salem Village became ill.

She had some kind of convulsions with delirium fits. Then Abigail Williams and the girls’ friend Ann Putnam, followed the same course. Doctors and ministers watched in horror as the girls contorted themselves, cowered under chairs, and shouted nonsense. Lacking a natural explanation, the Puritans turned to the supernatural, the girls were bewitched. Prodded by Parris and others, they named their tormentors: a disheveled beggar named Sarah Good, the elderly Sarah Osburn, and Tituba herself.

Each woman was something of a misfit. Osburn claimed innocence. Good did likewise but fingered Osburn. Tituba, recollection refreshed by Parris’s lash, confessed March 1692 that  “The devil came to me and bid me serve him”. Villagers sat spellbound as Tituba spoke of black dogs, red cats, yellow birds, and a white-haired man who bade her sign the devil’s book. There were several undiscovered witches, she said, and they yearned to destroy the Puritans.

Finding witches became a crusade not only for Salem but all Massachusetts. Before long the crusade turned into a convulsion, and the witch-hunters ultimately proved far more deadly than their prey. Anne Putman, is probably one of the key element of the story but we do not have much details concerning this rich hysterical woman who joined the “Circus girls”.

In May of 1692 the Salem Witch Trials began and quickly degenerated into a circus. Among the charges against one alleged witch, Martha Cory, the girls claimed that the alleged witch could wring her own hands and thereby hurt the girls physically. The girls also went into convulsions and other dramatics while in the court room. One of the girls claimed to have "spectral evidence",  in other words, a specter or evil spirit which only the girl perceived but which was invisible to the human eye.

Incredibly enough, this was considered as legitimate evidence of witchcraft by the accused. The "afflicted" were those supposedly "possessed" and "tormented"; it was they who accused or "cried out" the names of those who were supposedly possessing them.            

In June of 1692, the special Court of Oyer and Terminer  (meaning "hearing and determination") sat in Salem to hear the cases of witchcraft. Presided over by Chief Justice William Stoughton, the court was made up of magistrates and jurors. The first to be tried was Bridget Bishop of Salem who was found guilty and was hanged on June 10. Nineteen “witches” were hanged at Gallows Hill in 1692, and one defendant, Giles Cory, was tortured to death for refusing to enter a plea at his trial.

Five others, including an infant, died in prison.  One man who refused to plead at all in the case, thereby not recognizing the court's authority, was crushed to death under a large stone. Tituba was jailed then resold and taken out of the Salem Village area.

Soon, however, the public and people in authority became alarmed that the trials were getting out of hand; anyone, it seemed, could be accused of witchcraft. On October 3, 1692, the Reverend Increase Mather, president of Harvard College, considered the most prominent minister in the colony, denounced the use of so-called spectral evidence.  “It were better,” Mather admonished his fellow ministers "that ten suspected witches should escape than one innocent person should be condemned.”

 Governor William Phips grew disgusted when his own wife was mentioned by the afflicted girls. Determined at last to quell the madness, he suspended the special Court of Oyer and Terminer he had earlier established to hear witchcraft cases. The Superior Court of Judicature, formed to replace the "witchcraft" court, did not allow spectral evidence. This belief in the power of the accused to use their invisible shapes or spectres to torture their victims had sealed the fates of those tried by the Court of Oyer and Terminer.

The new court condemned only 3 of 56 defendants. In May 1693 Phips pardoned all those who were still in prison on witchcraft charges along with five others awaiting execution. In effect, the Salem witch trials were over.

Massachusetts as a whole repented the Salem witch-hunt in stages. The colony observed a day of atonement in 1697. It prompted one of the judges to seek public forgiveness for his role in the trials. That same year time, Reverend Joseph Green succeeded Samuel Parris as minister in Salem Village. Green reshuffled his congregation’s traditional seating plan, placing foes beside one another. As he had hoped, proximity bred charity. At Green’s urging, Ann Putnam, one of the leading accusers, offered a public apology in 1706.

In 1711 the legislature passed a bill restoring the rights and good names of some of the victims of “those dark and severe Prosecutions,”awarding restitution to their heirs”. Massachusetts apologized again in 1957, and the city of Salem and the town of Danvers (originally Salem Village) dedicated memorials to the slain “witches” in 1992.

The only good to come out of this disgrace to the legal system was that eventually other people came to their senses and condemned the Salem Witch Trials. But the stain of the Witch Trials remained. The symbols of authority  ( the reverend, the doctor, and the judge) had all participated in this travesty of justice and abomination of morality.