Salem Witch Trials expose social tensions

In 1692, accusations of witchcraft in Salem Village and Salem Town led Massachusetts authorities to arrest more than one hundred people and execute nineteen by hanging. Governor Sir William Phips created the Court of Oyer and Terminer in May 1692, and judges such as William Stoughton accepted spectral evidence during the prosecutions. The trials spread beyond Salem into Essex County before Phips halted the proceedings later in 1692.

The Salem trials exposed a severe crisis of authority inside the newly chartered Province of Massachusetts Bay. Frontier war after King William's War, disputes within Salem Village, and uncertainty after the 1691 charter all heightened fear at the very moment the province's legal institutions were being rebuilt. The reliance on spectral evidence showed how fragile the boundary remained between Puritan religious belief and formal judicial procedure in 1692 Massachusetts.

Governor Phips dissolved the Court of Oyer and Terminer in October 1692, and the Superior Court of Judicature later rejected spectral evidence in the remaining cases. Public repentance, compensation acts, and the 1711 reversal for many victims followed from the collapse of a prosecution system that had disgraced provincial Massachusetts.