Faces of Salem

10/10/2026

Currently in Salem

10/05/2026

Monday Spotlight: Sarah Parker Remond

Few people born in Salem carried the fight for freedom farther from home than Sarah Parker Remond. Born in Salem on June 6, 1826, Sarah was the daughter of John and Nancy Remond, members of one of the city's most prominent free Black families. Her father had immigrated to Massachusetts from Curaçao as a child, while her mother descended from a Revolutionary War veteran. Together, John and Nancy built successful businesses in Salem and raised their children in a household deeply committed to education, abolition, and civil rights.

That commitment was tested early. Sarah and her sisters were admitted to a local girls' school, only to be expelled because they were Black. The experience remained with Sarah for the rest of her life. She later described the injustice as being engraved upon her heart "like the scarlet letter of Hester." Her family temporarily left Salem for Newport, Rhode Island, hoping their children would find better educational opportunities there, but even those schools refused to admit Black students. Members of the local Black community eventually established their own school.

The Remonds returned to Salem in 1841, and Sarah continued educating herself through books, newspapers, lectures, and the growing abolitionist movement around her. Salem had become an important center of anti-slavery activity, and the Remond family was deeply involved. Their home welcomed abolitionists including William Lloyd Garrison and Wendell Phillips, and reportedly provided shelter to people escaping slavery. Sarah's mother helped found the Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society, while her older brother Charles Lenox Remond became one of the most prominent Black abolitionist lecturers in America.

Sarah soon found her own voice. At only 16 years old, she delivered her first public anti-slavery lecture alongside Charles in Groton, Massachusetts. By adulthood, she had become a formidable speaker in her own right, and her activism extended beyond slavery.

In 1853, Sarah purchased tickets with friends to attend an opera at Boston's Howard Athenaeum. When she arrived, she was told that she would have to sit in a segregated section. She refused and was forcibly removed from the theater and pushed down a flight of stairs. Rather than accept what happened, Sarah sued. She won $500 in damages, and the court ordered the theater to integrate its seating. This was years before the Civil War and more than a century before the modern Civil Rights Movement.

By 1856, the American Anti-Slavery Society had hired Sarah as a lecturer. She traveled throughout the North speaking against slavery alongside some of the most recognizable activists of the era, including Susan B. Anthony. William Lloyd Garrison praised her calm and dignified speaking style and her ability to appeal directly to the conscience of an audience.

In 1858, Sarah took her fight overseas. She sailed for Britain, where she would spend the next several years giving anti-slavery lectures throughout England, Scotland, and Ireland. Between 1859 and 1861 alone, she delivered more than 45 lectures. At one appearance in Edinburgh, more than 2,000 people reportedly crowded in to hear her speak. Sarah talked not only about slavery itself, but also about the lives of free Black Americans and the racism they faced throughout the United States. She spoke openly about the sexual exploitation of enslaved Black women, giving British audiences a perspective they rarely heard from American speakers.

While lecturing, Sarah continued the education that racism had denied her as a child. She studied at Bedford College in London, taking courses in subjects including French, Latin, literature, history, music, and elocution. During the Civil War, she used her platform to build British support for the Union and urged the British public not to allow its dependence on Southern cotton to weaken opposition to slavery. After emancipation, she began raising money and supplies for millions of newly freed people attempting to build lives after generations of enslavement.

Her activism also expanded into women's rights. In 1866, Sarah was among approximately 1,500 women who signed an important British petition demanding voting rights for women. She may have been the only Black woman whose name appeared on it.

Then Sarah began another remarkable chapter of her life. In 1867, at the age of 41, she moved to Florence, Italy, and entered medical training at the Santa Maria Nuova Hospital school. She graduated in 1868 and became a physician. The girl who had once been denied an education because of the color of her skin had become a doctor in Europe.

Sarah remained in Italy and practiced medicine for more than 20 years. She eventually settled in Rome, where 2 of her sisters later joined her. In 1877, she married Lazzaro Pintor, an Italian man from Sardinia. She never returned permanently to the United States.

Sarah Parker Remond died in Rome on December 13, 1894, at the age of 68 and was buried there in the Protestant Cemetery. Her legacy now stretches across 2 continents, and she has been honored at the Massachusetts State House, remembered with plaques and institutions in Britain, and recognized by universities for her contributions to abolition, education, women's rights, and racial equality.

And in 2026, Salem gave her one of its most meaningful honors. The Salem School Committee unanimously voted to name the merged Carlton and Saltonstall elementary school the Sarah Parker Remond School, with the new name taking effect on July 1, 2026.

There is something especially fitting about that. As a child, Sarah Parker Remond was pushed out of a Salem school because she was Black. Nearly 200 years later, children in Salem now walk into a public school bearing her name.

10/03/2026

10/03/2026

Welcome to Salem October

10/02/2026

Friday Spotlight: Mary Warren

There is one person involved in the Salem Witch Trials whom I find particularly fascinating because, for one brief moment in 1692, she appears to have said the quiet part out loud. Her name was Mary Warren.

Mary was about 20 years old in 1692 and worked as a servant in the household of John and Elizabeth Proctor. She would become one of the afflicted accusers, then an accused witch herself, then a confessor, and eventually an accuser again. Her story is messy, contradictory, and sometimes difficult to follow, but buried inside it is one statement that I think deserves far more attention. Mary Warren said the afflicted were pretending. And I believe her.

I want to be careful about what I mean by that. I cannot prove that every afflicted person consciously lied about every fit, accusation, or experience. Nobody can. Historians have debated psychological, religious, social, medical, and political explanations for more than 300 years, and the surviving evidence does not allow us to know exactly what every person involved was thinking. But we do have Mary Warren's own words.

Mary began experiencing fits while living with the Proctors. John Proctor, who was already deeply skeptical of the accusations, apparently had little patience for them. He put Mary back to work and threatened punishment if the behavior continued. Whatever we think today about his methods, something interesting happened: Mary's fits stopped.

By early April, Mary considered herself recovered enough that she submitted a note asking the congregation to give thanks for her recovery. On April 3, Reverend Samuel Parris read the note before the congregation, and Mary was questioned afterward about what had happened to her and about the experiences of the other afflicted people.

According to testimony preserved in Mary's case, she said that “the afflicted persons did but dissemble.” In 17th-century language, dissemble meant to pretend, feign, or conceal the truth. During her examination on April 19, Mary also began to say, “I will tell, they did, they did, they did,” before falling into another fit.

There is another piece of testimony that I think is just as important. People who spent time with Mary while she was imprisoned later said that Mary discussed the visions she had experienced when she herself had been afflicted. According to their account, Mary said that while she was in that condition she believed she had seen the apparitions of around 100 people because “her head was distempered.” Once she recovered, however, she could no longer say that she had actually seen those apparitions.

That is one of the reasons I believe Mary Warren when she said something was wrong with what everyone around her was treating as supernatural evidence. She had experienced the fits herself, recovered, and then apparently questioned the reality of what she thought she had seen.

This does not necessarily mean that every afflicted girl sat down together and deliberately planned a conspiracy. Human behavior is rarely that simple. Fear, religious expectation, genuine psychological distress, social pressure, deliberate deception, and the attention surrounding the afflicted could all have existed at the same time. But Mary's statement strongly suggests that at least one person who had been inside that group later believed the behavior was not what the authorities thought it was.

I've joked on tours, “Have you ever been to a preschool?” One kid starts doing something and suddenly several others are doing it too. Obviously, Salem Village was not a preschool, and I would never present that joke as a historical diagnosis. But the underlying idea is not ridiculous. Human beings imitate one another, especially within groups. Behaviors can spread. Attention can reinforce them. Expectations can influence how people interpret what they are experiencing.

And we can actually see group behavior in the surviving Salem records. The afflictions began with a small number of people and expanded. During examinations, accusers often reacted together. They collapsed, cried out, mimicked movements, claimed to experience pain when an accused person moved, and reinforced one another's reports of invisible attacks. None of that proves that every fit was consciously staged, but it does show that these events did not occur in isolation.

The adults surrounding them also gave these behaviors enormous importance. Magistrates questioned accused people based on what the afflicted claimed to see. Ministers attended examinations. Crowds gathered. A girl's reaction to the movement of someone's hand could suddenly become evidence of witchcraft. Claims about invisible specters were treated seriously enough to take away someone's freedom and, eventually, help send people to the gallows.

Then Mary Warren challenged it and almost immediately, the system turned on her.

On April 19, Mary was brought before John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin, no longer simply as an afflicted witness but as an accused witch. The afflicted fell into fits around her, and Elizabeth Hubbard testified against her. The magistrates confronted Mary with the sudden reversal in her position, asking how she had gone from being afflicted to supposedly afflicting others. Mary was trapped inside the same machinery she had helped create.

Eventually, under enormous pressure, her story changed again. She confessed to witchcraft and began accusing other people, including John and Elizabeth Proctor. That part of Mary's story cannot be ignored. Innocent people suffered because of accusations she made. But it also shows just how powerful the incentives of the trials had become.

By the spring and summer of 1692, confession could save an accused person's life. As mentioned in previous posts, those who admitted to witchcraft and cooperated with the authorities were generally kept alive. Those who maintained their innocence were increasingly being convicted and executed. Mary learned what happened when she challenged the accepted story. She became one of the accused herself.

When she returned to the narrative the court expected, she became useful again.

That brings me to one of the most frustrating questions surrounding the Salem Witch Trials. Could this have been avoided? I believe it could have.

The authorities did not need to somehow prove that every afflicted person was consciously lying. They simply needed to stop treating extraordinary claims as evidence without independent proof. If someone claimed an invisible specter was attacking them, that claim should not have been enough to arrest another human being. If one person's movements supposedly caused another person's fits, the possibility of imitation, suggestion, or coincidence should have been considered before supernatural causation.

They also could have paid attention to contradictions. Accusations changed. Stories expanded. People confessed to impossible things when confession offered them a chance to survive. Others who insisted on their innocence were executed. Those patterns should have created doubt.

Most importantly, they could have listened when someone from inside the afflicted group told them the behavior should not be trusted.

Mary Warren gave them that opportunity and, instead, they accused her too.

We will probably never know exactly what Mary believed at every stage of 1692. Her behavior changed too many times for any simple explanation. She may have been frightened. She may have experienced genuine psychological distress. She may have lied. She may have been trying to survive. More than 1 of those things could have been true at the same time.

But we know what she reportedly said after her original fits stopped.

The afflicted “did but dissemble.”

More than 300 years later, I think Mary Warren deserves to be taken seriously. Her statement does not solve the Salem Witch Trials, but for one brief moment, someone standing inside the hysteria told the people around her that what they were seeing was not what they thought it was.

History might have been very different if they had listened.

09/30/2026

Spotlight: Martha Corey

This September, we remember the 9 innocent people who lost their lives during the final month of ex*****ons in the Salem Witch Trials. Today, we remember Martha Corey.

Martha Corey was not an obvious target. She was a full member of the church, considered pious, and by 1692 had worked hard to build a respectable life in Salem Village. That is part of what made her accusation so important. Up to that point, many of those accused had lived on the margins of society. Martha did not. Once the accusations reached a woman like her, it became clear that no amount of respectability, church membership, or social standing could guarantee safety.

Martha's early life is difficult to reconstruct with certainty. She was born somewhere in New England, but her exact birth date and even some details of her parentage remain unclear. Before her marriage to Giles Corey, she had already lived through a complicated personal history. She had a son, Benoni, born outside of marriage, something that carried enormous social stigma in Puritan New England. She later married Henry Rich and had another son, Thomas. After Henry's death, Martha married the wealthy Salem Village farmer Giles Corey in 1690.

As discussed on the 19th, Giles had a difficult reputation of his own. He had been involved in numerous legal disputes and, most seriously, had been prosecuted after severely beating his farm worker Jacob Goodale, who later died. Martha and Giles were both people with complicated pasts, but by the early 1690s they had become members of the church and were living together on Giles's farm in Salem Farms, modern day Peabody, MA.

When the witchcraft accusations began in early 1692, Martha was openly skeptical. Giles attended the first examinations, but Martha apparently believed the proceedings were foolish and even tried to prevent him from going to one by removing or hiding his saddle. Whether she was simply arguing with her husband or actively protesting the trials, people noticed, and soon the accusations turned toward her.

Ann Putnam Jr. claimed Martha's specter had attacked her. Before any formal examination, Edward Putnam and Ezekiel Cheever went to speak with Martha. They first stopped at the Putnam house, intending to ask Ann what clothing Martha's specter had been wearing so they could compare it to what Martha actually had on. Ann claimed Martha's specter had blinded her and prevented her from seeing. When the men reached Martha's home, she surprised them by already knowing why they had come. “I know what ye are coming for,” she reportedly told them. “Ye are come to talk with me about being a witch.” Then she asked whether Ann had told them what clothes she was wearing.

To Putnam and Cheever, the question was deeply suspicious. How could Martha know what they intended to ask? Martha later explained that she had heard people discussing how the afflicted supposedly identified the clothing worn by the specters they saw. But in the atmosphere of 1692, an ordinary explanation was no longer enough.

A warrant was issued for Martha's arrest on March 19. Because it could not be served on Sunday, Martha remained free through March 20 and went to church. Despite knowing that people were calling her a witch and that an arrest warrant was waiting for her, Martha dressed for worship and took her place in the Salem Village meetinghouse as a full member of the congregation. During the service, the afflicted began crying out. Abigail Williams claimed she could see Martha sitting on a beam and nursing a yellow bird between her fingers.

The following day, Martha was arrested and brought back to that same meetinghouse, this time as a prisoner. Her examination quickly became chaotic. The afflicted girls mimicked her movements, fell into fits when she turned her head, claimed to see yellow birds around her, and said that an invisible man was whispering into her ear. John Hathorne repeatedly questioned Martha about how she had known Edward Putnam and Ezekiel Cheever were coming to speak with her.

Martha refused to give him the answers he wanted. When one of the afflicted claimed a man was whispering to her, Hathorne asked Martha what he had said. Martha replied, “We must not believe all that these distracted children say.” Throughout the examination, she denied having anything to do with witchcraft. She laughed at some of the accusations and asked to be allowed to pray. Most importantly, she repeatedly identified herself as something entirely incompatible with the crime being alleged against her: “I am an innocent person. I never had to do with witchcraft since I was born. I am a gospel woman.” The afflicted girls immediately mocked her, calling her a “gospel witch.” Even her faith was turned against her.

The situation became more complicated because of Giles. Early in the proceedings, he had made statements that appeared to support suspicions against his wife. He described strange illnesses involving an ox and a cat, said Martha had criticized the way he prayed, and told others that he knew things that could “fix her business.” Whether Giles actually believed Martha was guilty, was simply complaining about his wife, or was swept up in the fear of the moment is impossible to know. But when Giles himself was accused and arrested in April, his attitude toward the court changed. He stopped cooperating and refused to provide the damaging testimony the magistrates wanted from him. For details on Giles, go to Sept 19th.

By then, both husband and wife were imprisoned. Martha remained in jail for months before her trial. In September, she was convicted of witchcraft and sentenced to death. Then the church turned against her too. On September 11, the Salem Village church voted to excommunicate Martha. Reverend Samuel Parris later visited her in jail to formally pronounce the sentence. His own record describes Martha as refusing to accept the judgment and continuing to defend herself. She had spent years becoming what she proudly called a “gospel woman,” and now, days before her death, the church stripped that identity from her.

On the way to gallows hill, Robert Calef later wrote that the cart carrying the condemned briefly became stuck on the way to the ex*****on site. Even this ordinary delay was interpreted as supernatural, with people claiming the Devil was preventing the cart from moving.

While at the gallows, Martha continued to proclaim her innocence. Calef wrote that she ended her life with “an eminent prayer upon the ladder.” She had been accused in part because people believed a true witch could not possess genuine Christian faith, yet Martha Corey went to her death praying.

Like most of the others, her remains have never been identified. There is something especially tragic about the final days of Martha and Giles Corey. Whatever their marriage had been like, whatever arguments they had shared, and whatever Giles had initially believed about the accusations against his wife, the trials ultimately consumed them both. Giles died beneath stones on September 19. Martha was hanged 3 days later. They were the only married couple both put to death during the Salem Witch Trials.

But Martha's story did not end with the rope. In 1703, the Salem Village church formally reversed her excommunication. The church record admitted that during those “dark” days, they had acted without sufficient grounds and had wrongly condemned her. They specifically asked that the sentence be removed so that the shame attached to Martha's name would not continue through future generations.

In 1711, Massachusetts formally reversed the convictions of both Martha and Giles Corey. Today, memorial stones honoring the couple stand near Crystal Lake in Peabody, on land once connected to Giles's farm. Martha's name is also carved at the Salem Witch Trials Memorial and at Proctor's Ledge.

Martha Corey entered the Salem Witch Trials believing the accusations were foolish. She questioned them, mocked them, and refused to pretend that invisible birds, spectral attacks, and the movements of frightened young people were proof of witchcraft. Then the same system she doubted came for her. She lost her freedom, her church, her husband, and finally her life, but she never surrendered the thing she had insisted upon from the beginning: “I am an innocent person.”

She was.

And with Martha Corey, we close our September Spotlights.

09/28/2026

Spotlight: Samuel Wardwell

This September, we remember the 9 innocent people who lost their lives during the final month of ex*****ons in the Salem Witch Trials. Today, we remember Samuel Wardwell.

Samuel Wardwell confessed to witchcraft, and then he took it back. By September of 1692, the people imprisoned for witchcraft had reason to understand the terrible choice before them. Those who confessed remained alive, while those who continued to proclaim their innocence were being convicted and sent to the gallows. Samuel had already given the authorities the confession they wanted. All he had to do was let the lie stand. Instead, he told the truth.

Samuel was born in 1643 and eventually settled in Andover MA with his wife, Sarah. By 1692, he was 49 years old and part of a large blended family. He and Sarah had married in 1673, bringing children from previous relationships into their marriage and having several more children together.

Samuel was also known around Andover for something that became incredibly dangerous in 1692. He practiced folk magic and told fortunes. It was said that he could predict how many children his neighbors would have and whether they would be boys or girls. Folk practices like these existed throughout colonial New England, but once accusations of diabolical witchcraft began spreading, Samuel's reputation gave his neighbors something they could reinterpret as evidence against him.

Samuel apparently understood the danger. As the witch hunt spread into Andover, he expressed concern to his brother-in-law, constable John Ballard, that he might become a target. According to later accounts, Ballard had not suspected Samuel. But by the summer of 1692, suspicion itself could be dangerous.

In July, the witchcraft crisis exploded across Andover. Eventually more people would be accused there than in any other community caught up in the trials. Confessions multiplied, and those confessions produced still more names. In late August, 16-year-old Martha Sprague of Boxford accused Samuel of witchcraft. His wife Sarah, his daughter Mercy, and his stepdaughter Sarah Hawkes were also accused. The accusations were no longer threatening only Samuel's life. His family was being pulled into the nightmare with him.

On September 1, the Wardwells were questioned. Samuel initially resisted but eventually confessed, claiming that he had signed the Devil's book roughly 20 years earlier and had been baptized in the Shawsheen River. He claimed that he could hurt Martha Sprague by pinching his own coat and buttons. His wife, daughter, and stepdaughter also gave confessions of witchcraft.

We should be careful about what the word "confession" means here. By this point, accused people had watched what happened to those who refused to confess. Bridget Bishop maintained her innocence and was hanged. Rebecca Nurse maintained hers and was hanged. Sarah Good, Elizabeth Howe, Susannah Martin, Sarah Wildes, and others did the same. Meanwhile, people who confessed remained alive. In the upside-down logic of 1692, admitting to witchcraft could save your life while insisting you were innocent could get you killed.

Samuel gave them the confession they wanted. Then, when his life depended upon maintaining it, he took it back.

Samuel was brought to trial on September 14. His confession was read before the court, but Samuel now said it was false. He recanted and maintained his innocence. His neighbors testified about his fortune-telling and predictions from years earlier. Practices that had once made Samuel an unusual local figure were now presented as evidence that he had been working with the Devil. Samuel Wardwell was found guilty and sentenced to death.

Think about the position he had placed himself in. He had already confessed. He had seen that confession could keep an accused person alive. His wife and children were imprisoned, and he had every reason imaginable to be frightened of dying. He could have continued telling the authorities what they wanted to hear. Instead, Samuel withdrew the confession and faced the consequences.

Even at the ex*****on site, Samuel continued trying to proclaim his innocence. Robert Calef, writing only a few years later in More Wonders of the Invisible World, recorded one final, almost unbelievable moment. As Samuel spoke to the people gathered there, the ex*****oner was smoking to***co. Smoke blew into Samuel's face and interrupted him. The accusers claimed that the Devil had used the smoke to prevent Samuel from speaking. Even an ex*****oner's to***co smoke could become evidence when people were determined to see witchcraft everywhere.

Samuel Wardwell was hanged on September 22, 1692, but his family's ordeal was not over. His wife Sarah remained imprisoned, as did his daughter Mercy and stepdaughter Sarah Hawkes. With Samuel dead and Sarah still in jail, arrangements had to be made for some of their younger children to live with other families.

In January 1693, the 3 women finally went before the new Superior Court. Mercy Wardwell and Sarah Hawkes were acquitted, but Sarah Wardwell was found guilty. Only months after watching the system take her husband, Samuel's widow was sentenced to suffer the same fate. She and several others were scheduled to be executed in February, but Governor William Phips issued reprieves. Sarah lived.

Eventually, the jails emptied and the surviving members of the Wardwell family were able to begin rebuilding their lives. But there was no undoing what had happened to Samuel. His story leaves us with one of the most disturbing contradictions of the Salem Witch Trials: Samuel Wardwell confessed and lived. Samuel Wardwell admitted his confession was a lie, and died.

He was 49 years old when he was hanged on the final ex*****on day of the Salem Witch Trials. 334 years later, we remember Samuel not for the confession frightened out of him, not for the fortune telling that was twisted into evidence against him, and certainly not as the witch the court declared him to be. We remember a husband and father who, when maintaining a lie might have saved his life, chose instead to proclaim his innocence.

Today, we remember Samuel Wardwell.

09/25/2026

Spotlight: Margaret Scott

This September, we remember the 9 innocent people who lost their lives during the final month of ex*****ons in the Salem Witch Trials. Today, we remember Margaret Scott.

By the time Margaret Scott was accused of witchcraft in 1692, she had already endured a lifetime of loss. She was in her 70s, had been a widow for more than 20 years, and had buried 4 of her 7 children. Her husband Benjamin had died in 1671, leaving behind an estate too small to support Margaret for the remainder of her life. She never remarried. Eventually, she was reduced to begging and, in 1692, even that would be used against her.

Margaret had been born in England around 1616 and married Benjamin Scott in 1642. They initially lived in Cambridge before settling in Rowley, Massachusetts, where they raised their family. Benjamin died after nearly 30 years of marriage, leaving Margaret to survive without the financial security a husband could provide in the 17th century.

For years, Margaret appears to have depended at least partly on the generosity of her neighbors. She asked for corn. She asked for wood. These were not luxuries. They were food and fuel, the basic necessities an elderly widow needed to survive.

Years later, some of those same requests came back to haunt her.

Captain Daniel Wicom testified about an encounter roughly 5 years before the trials when Margaret had asked permission to glean his cornfield, meaning she wanted to gather what remained after the main harvest. Wicom told her to wait until he had collected what he wanted. Later, when his oxen were unable to pull a cart of corn from the field, he came to believe Margaret had bewitched them.

Thomas Nelson told a similar story. Margaret had repeatedly asked him for wood connected to a debt he owed her. After he refused her, 2 of his cows died and he blamed Margaret.

These incidents happened years before anyone arrested her. An elderly widow asked for food and wood. Animals later behaved strangely or died. In 1692, coincidence became witchcraft.

The accusations against Margaret did not begin until very late in the crisis. In April, Frances Wicom claimed she began experiencing strange afflictions and believed Margaret was choking her, either physically or through her specter. Then in late July, 19-year-old Mary Daniel claimed Margaret's specter pinched her, pricked the soles of her feet and pulled her backward out of a chair. Within days, she was arrested.

She was examined on August 5. An accused woman identified in the surviving records only as “M.G.” claimed that she and Margaret had made themselves invisible and attacked Captain Wicom. Margaret denied it.

But by this point, accusations were multiplying rapidly. Mary Warren and Elizabeth Hubbard claimed they had witnessed Margaret torment Mary Daniel and said Margaret had afflicted them as well. Ann Putnam Jr. supported Frances Wicom's accusations. Stories that had accumulated around Margaret for years were suddenly being presented as evidence of supernatural crimes.

The case against her was remarkably small compared with those brought against some of the other victims. Much of it came from only 2 neighboring families and Mary Daniel. Even the surviving documentation of Margaret's prosecution is unusually sparse, leading historian Mary Beth Norton to suggest that the evidence against Margaret Scott and Wilmot Redd may have been assembled in haste.

Yet the court was willing to take Margaret's life. Her trial took place on September 15. Stories stretching back 5 or 10 years were brought forward. Dead neighbors who had supposedly believed Margaret was a witch were mentioned even though they could no longer speak for themselves. Sick people, dead livestock, an immovable cart and the accusations of afflicted young women were assembled into a case for witchcraft.

Lie many others, she maintained her innocence and we've learned what that means. On September 17, 1692, she was found guilty and sentenced to death.

There is something particularly cruel about Margaret Scott's story because some of the evidence used to condemn her came directly from her poverty. When she needed corn, she asked for corn. When she needed wood, she asked for wood. When neighbors refused her and something unfortunate happened afterward, years later they remembered the elderly widow who had come to their doors. The woman who once needed their help became the woman they feared.

Margaret's remains were never identified, and we do not know where she was buried. In 1992, 300 years after her death, a memorial stone was erected for her in Rowley at the intersection of Main Street and Pleasant Street. But her legal conviction remained.

She was also not among many of the victims whose convictions were formally reversed in 1711. More than 250 years later, legislation in 1957 still failed to clear her individually by name. It was not until October 31, 2001, 309 years after Margaret Scott was hanged, that Massachusetts finally explicitly exonerated her.

Margaret Scott had lived long enough to bury a husband and 4 children. Personally, that his me hard. I've lost a child...I can't imagine losing 4. She spent more than 20 years as a widow. She became poor enough that she had to ask her neighbors for food and wood simply to survive.

And when fear came to Rowley in 1692, those moments of desperation were remembered not as evidence that Margaret needed help, but as evidence that she was dangerous.

She was the only person from Rowley executed for witchcraft during the Salem Witch Trials.