When the nine-year-old daughter of Samuel Parris, a local minister, and several of her friends went into convulsions, the seaport town of Salem in the Massachusetts Bay Colony fell into hysteria. Many of Salem’s citizens had brought from England a belief in witchcraft and quickly accepted the diagnosis that the young girls were bewitched. Three innocent people were arrested in 1692 for practicing witchcraft on the children: Tituba, a slave in the Parris household who had told them superstitious tales; Sarah Good, an impoverished mother; and the bedridden Sarah Osburn. Good was hanged on Gallows Hill.

Thus began the largest witch hunt in American history. By mid-1693, Salem had executed 20 people and imprisoned about 150 others, including local dignitaries, for alleged witch crimes. The panic ended only when Governor Sir William Phips, his own wife accused of witchcraft, freed all people jailed for the crime. The colony legislature made reparation to the heirs of the witch hunt victims nearly twenty years later.

Some historians theorize that Parris instigated the witch hunt to be rid of certain people linked to the merchant class in Salem, who he believed threatened the traditional views held by his congregation of farmers. Modern speculation suggests that the young girls’ convulsions may have been caused by eating rye bread poisoned by ergot, a fungus that infects flour; ergot is the source of LSD.

PostScript: John Hathorne, one of the judges who committed Tituba, Good and Osburn, was an ancestor of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who changed the spelling of his name after completing college.