The Accusation and Punishment of Witches in Salem In the late 1600s in Salem, dozens of people were accused of practicing witchcraft and working with the Devil to torment people. It all started when a child grew ill for seemingly no reason, causing the people of Salem to believe a witch was among them. Children started accusing men and women of witchcraft, and those men and women would pay for their alleged crimes. They were thrown in disgusting jails, chained to the walls, drowned, lit on fire, and hanged for crimes they did not commit. People confessed to working with the Devil for the chance that they would be spared by the church. The accused witches were casted out of society and treated like animals. The witch-hunt of Salem was an outbreak of paranoia and hysteria that tons of innocent women and children paid for with their lives.
How Witches Were Accused Children were reportedly screaming for no reason, having seizures in church, and going into trances and no one understood
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He refused to say anything to the court about who was a witch. A plank was set on Corey’s chest and they places heavy rocks on it. After a day of this, Giles Corey pleaded with them for more weight so he would die instead of continuing to be tortured, and they considered it a suicide (Uschan). Aside from torture in prison, the majority of witches found guilty in Salem were hanged. 156 people were imprisoned, 19 were hanged, 5 died in jail, and 1 was pressed to death (Alexander, 2002). The aftermath of the Salem witch trials left many people feeling immense guilt for either accusing those they knew were innocent, or sending those innocent people to their deaths. Dominic Alexander put it best when he said, “Although the witch-hunts remain among the most horrific events of European history, one good emerged from all the misery: torture ceased to be a normal part of the judicial process” (2002, pg. 197).