![]() ![]() None of the accused were “witches,” defined in the seventeenth century as one who had sold their soul to the devil. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs: Picture Collection, The New York Public Library At least five died in jail, including the infant daughter of convicted Sarah Good. ![]() In total, between 150 and 200 people were imprisoned, ranging in age from four to eighty-one years old. Though popularly referred to as “the Salem witch trials,” accusations had spread throughout Essex County and beyond. Over the course of a year and a half, nineteen people were hanged and one man was brutally tortured to death. Salem’s witch trials were the largest and deadliest in North American history. As we mark the memorial’s thirtieth anniversary, it is perhaps more important than ever to remember the lessons of these injustices. Twenty granite benches jut from the walls, each bearing the name of a person unjustly accused and killed.Įrected in 1992, this was Salem’s first public monument to those tragic events. Entering a rectangular space bordered by rough stone walls and shaded by towering locust trees, one crosses a wide threshold inscribed with the words of the victims, their protestations of innocence and pleas to God clipped by the memorial walls, symbolizing the community’s indifference to their plight. ![]() Now, 330 years later, visitors to this seaside city will find a simple, peaceful memorial next to an aged colonial graveyard and hear, in the near distance, the occasional sound of church bells. It was during the exceedingly hot summer of 1692 when Puritan judges in Salem, an English settlement in the Province of Massachusetts Bay, condemned twenty people of witchcraft and publicly executed them. ![]()
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