Salem Witch Trials
22 September 1692
The air crackled with tension as the people of Salem, Massachusetts, gathered on Gallows Hill to witness the latest round of justice. The eight men and women who had been brought by cart were neighbours, even friends and family - but this only made their batrayal sharper. For those eight - Martha Corey, Alice Parker, Mary Parker, Margaret Scott, Mary Eastey, Ann Pudeator, Wilmot Redd and Samuel Wardwell Sr - were all guilty of the most hideous and unfirgiveable of sins God's eyes: withcraft.
There was doubt of their guilt. The cart had carried the condemned on their final journey had been beset with diffculties - the devil's work, the people had muttered, but even the devil could not save his own now. Marthw Corey prayed most earnestly before she was turned off into oblivion. and Mary Eastey's moving farewell to those that she would leave behind caused many tears from those who listened before the rope was set about her neck. But many others remained unmoved - those "Firebrands of Hell", as one observer called them, were getting no less than they deserved.
Mercifully, although the gathered group did not yet kown it, this would be the last time their beleaguered community would witness the death of a witch on the gallows. There must have been many there that day. accuser and accused alike, who wondered how they had come to this.
