The Salem Witch Trials: One Of The Most Famous Mass Hysteria Examples
Public DomainAn 1880 sketch of Mary Walcott at the Salem Witch Trials.
Perhaps the most famous example of mass hysteria, the Salem Witch Trials were a series of trials and executions that took place in Salem Village, Massachusetts between 1692 and 1693.
The ordeal began in January 1692, when the young daughter and niece of the Puritan minister Samuel Parris began to experience violent “fits,” convulsing, screaming, contorting, and making strange noises.
Soon, other young girls in the village began exhibiting similar symptoms, sparking widespread concern among the townsfolk. The case soon took a dark turn when the girls, pressed to explain their bizarre fits, accused three women in the town of being witches and putting hexes on them: Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne, and Tituba, a woman enslaved by Parris.
Town officials interrogated the accused for days. Fearing persecution, Tituba eventually confessed to practicing witchcraft and implicated both Good and Osborne.
She also suggested that there were other witches who had signed a deal with the devil, leading to a panic among the people of Salem, who soon began to accuse others of witchcraft. Many of these alleged witches were outcasts who lived outside the fray of Puritan beliefs and influence, or else had rivalries with other people in town.
While suspects who denied practicing witchcraft could still be sentenced to death, accused “witches” who confessed and implicated others were often allowed to live, as the Puritans believed they would face God’s judgement after death. As a result, suspected witches would often accuse others of witchcraft to spare their own lives, creating a domino effect that quickly flamed out of control.
On May 10, 1692, Sarah Osborne became the first casualty of the witch hunt when she died in prison while awaiting her trial. A month later, the first “witch” was formally executed. Then, on July 19, 1692, five more accused witches were executed by hanging, including Sarah Good.
In total, some 200 people were accused of witchcraft. Nineteen people were hanged, one man was pressed to death with heavy stones, and five more died in prison.
The trials finally came to an end in 1693 as the accusations became more outlandish, implicating even those at the top of the social order. The magistrates also began rejecting forms of evidence that had been crucial for past convictions, such as “spectral evidence” — a form of testimony in which witnesses claimed to have seen the specter of their alleged attacker.
Today, modern scholars have suggested that this witch hunting frenzy may have been caused by ergot poisoning, or that the “bewitched” girls had experienced some combination of a variety of ailments, including epilepsy, asthma, encephalitis, and psychosis.
But others have surmised it was a classic example of mass hysteria with fatal consequences.
