![]() ![]() ![]() It is not the duration nor the death toll that makes this historical moment such a dark one, but the question of why a small, insular community of New Englanders ended up turning on one another with such fear and ferocity. Whether this was madness or mass hysteria, it was short-lived a feverish delirium arriving in February 1692 and abating in May 1693. ![]() Girls, believed to be "bewitched" victims, provided a ghastly sideshow of fits and contortions to the gallery to corroborate the workings of sorcery. Spectral visions of women flying through the air, or turning into cats and birds, were used as evidence. Between 144 and 185 witches were named in 25 villages and towns. Some issued last pleas of innocence before being tripped off the scaffold. The eldest was almost 80, the youngest, five. Where, amid a God-fearing colonial community in Massachusetts, 20 men, women, children – and two dogs – were sentenced to death for witchcraft. Arthur Miller described it as the "coming madness" in the overture of his 1953 play, The Crucible, which dramatised the moment in late-17th-century America when paranoia intersected with persecution to cause the perfect storm in the small town of Salem. ![]()
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