Salem's Witches Never Felt a Single Flame

Picture Salem in 1692 and you probably see a stake, a crowd, and a pile of burning wood. It's the image movies and Halloween decorations keep handing us, and it's missing from the record.

Not one person in the Salem witch trials was burned. The 19 people executed for witchcraft were hanged at Gallows Hill, and the count of the dead includes one more person who died in a very different way.

The reason is legal. In England, witchcraft was a secular felony under a 1604 statute, and the law prescribed death as a felon. Felons were hanged, and the act never mentions fire.

Burning belonged to other systems. On the European continent and in Scotland, witchcraft was treated as heresy, and heretics went to the stake. Puritan Massachusetts followed English law, not that tradition.

England did burn people, just not for witchcraft itself. Women who killed their husbands were burned for petty treason, while men who killed their masters were hanged. Mary Lakeland was burned in Ipswich in 1645 for using witchcraft to murder her husband.

Then there's Giles Corey, a farmer around 81 who refused to enter a plea. The court applied peine forte et dure, an old practice of piling weights on the accused to force an answer.

He was pressed to death over several days in September 1692. Even by the court's own rules, the punishment had no legal basis in Massachusetts. So the tally reads 19 hanged, one pressed, and none burned.