1692 Salem: A few girls convulsed and screamed, and in the end twenty people lost their lives

In the winter of 1692, in a place called Salem Village in the Massachusetts colony of America, something strange happened in the home of the village minister. The minister's daughter Betty, nine years old, and his niece Abigail, eleven years old, began to convulse all over, scream, crawl on the ground, and sometimes say that their bodies were being pricked by needles. A doctor examined them and could find no illness, finally saying one sentence: they were likely bewitched.

The adults in the village began to ask them: who is harming you? The girls gave three names: a servant from the Caribbean named Tituba; an old woman who begged on the streets named Sarah Good; and a sick woman who hadn't been to church in a long time named Sarah Osborne. The three were arrested. The servant confessed during interrogation and said there were other "accomplices" in the village. From there, things spun out of control.

Over the next few months, more and more people were accused, with over two hundred arrested and tried. There were ministers, farmers, and an elderly farmer named Giles Corey, eighty-one years old. The court believed he refused to plead "guilty" or "not guilty", so they placed stones on him one by one to force him to speak. In the end, he only said one sentence: "More weight." He died there.

From June to September, a total of nineteen people were hanged, and several others died in prison.

In October 1692, the governor ordered the trials to stop, because someone began to accuse his wife. The following year, the remaining people were gradually released. In 1697, one of the judges at the time stood up publicly in church and asked people to forgive him. In 1711, the colonial government paid compensation to the families of the victims.

After this incident, for more than three hundred years, some people's names were still not officially cleared. Until July 2022, the Massachusetts state legislature passed a decision declaring a woman named Elizabeth Johnson innocent. She had been sentenced to death at the time, but it was not carried out, and later no one exonerated her. This was driven by a teacher at a local middle school and her students, who spent several years writing letters one by one to push it forward.

As for why those girls fell ill, some say they ate moldy rye and suffered ergot poisoning; some say it was mass hysteria in a repressive village; and others say a few children were just pretending. To this day, there is no conclusion.

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