By March 7, 1692, three women were sitting in a Boston jail waiting for a trial that could not legally happen. The colony had no sitting governor. The new charter was still at sea. The courts had no standing to try a capital case. The machinery of accusation was running. The machinery of justice was not.
March 2, 1692: The Devil’s Book Has Nine Names
Constable Samuel Braybrook reported that Sarah Good escaped his custody three times during transport to the Ipswich jail. He also claimed she attempted to take her own life during the journey, though he offered no details beyond that bare statement. Whatever happened on that road, it left more questions than answers.
Back in Salem, Sarah Osborne maintained her innocence. Tituba did not. She told the magistrates the devil had appeared to her on January 15 in human form, claiming to be God, demanding six years of service. Five days later, on January 20, he returned with four witches and sent her into the parsonage to harm the children. “I went in and would not hurt them a good while. I would not hurt Betty. I loved Betty, but they hauled me and made me pinch Betty and then Abigail.”
Then came the detail that changed everything. Tituba confessed to signing the devil’s book in blood. The book, she said, already held nine signatures. She could identify Sarah Good and Sarah Osborne among them. The others she could not read. Seven witches still unidentified. Still at large. Somewhere in Massachusetts, some in Salem, some in Boston. The affair had just become a hunt.
Five community members formally deposed against the three accused women that day: Elizabeth Hubbard, Samuel Parris, Thomas Putnam, Ezekiel Cheever, and Ann Putnam Jr. A deposition was a formal written statement given under oath, carrying the same legal weight as testimony delivered in court.
March 3, 1692: The Evidence Nobody Else Could See
On March 3, the specter of four-year-old Dorothy Good allegedly attacked Ann Putnam Jr., accompanied by an unknown woman.
A specter, in this world, was the spiritual form of a living person. It was believed to leave the body and roam. It could pinch, choke, bite, press its victim to sign the devil’s book, while the actual person stood somewhere else entirely, including right there in the courtroom in front of the judges. The afflicted could see it. No one else could. That asymmetry was the trap.
Benjamin Hutchinson, great-granduncle of co-host Josh Hutchinson, illustrated how it worked. Abigail Williams told him she could see the specter of former minister George Burroughs standing before her. Hutchinson saw nothing. He drew his rapier and stabbed at the air. Abigail cheered that he had hit it.
The judges accepted this. The central question they were grappling with: could the devil assume the shape of an innocent person without their consent? Magistrates like William Stoughton believed no, which made a spectral accusation functionally equivalent to proof. Boston ministers warned otherwise. Cotton Mather would draft a report in June 1692 saying demons could impersonate the innocent, and that spectral evidence should not be trusted. The judges largely ignored it.
Also on March 3, Tituba was questioned a THIRD time and required to repeat her confessions.
March 4, 1692: A Quiet Day That Echoes
No warrants. No examinations. The three accused women sat in jail while Salem processed what had happened three days earlier.
The date carries an odd weight. Decades earlier, on March 4, 1629, the Massachusetts Bay Colony charter became operative, the document that allowed the colonists to carry their government across the Atlantic, establishing a self-governing Puritan settlement answerable to no one in London. It was revoked in 1684. By March 4, 1692, the replacement was still somewhere on the Atlantic, not yet arrived.
On the same date in 1681, King Charles II granted Pennsylvania to William Penn. By 1692, that colony had been operating for eleven years. It had never executed anyone for witchcraft. The operating system of a colony, its law, its theology, its relationship to authority, determined what it was capable of doing to its own people in a crisis. Massachusetts in 1692 was running without a valid charter, without a sitting governor, and with two decades of war and loss still unresolved. Pennsylvania was not.
March 5, 1692: The Adults Start Talking
Sarah Good was moved from the Ipswich jail to the Salem jail. Questioned again, she held her position. Tituba held hers too, repeating her confessions a FOURTH time.
Then four men submitted a formal statement: William Allen, William Good (husband of the arrested Sarah Good), John Hughes, and Samuel Braybrook. The magistrates read it aloud in court.
Allen said on the night of March 1 he heard a noise, approached it, and watched a beast vanish and two or three women fly away in a manner unlike anything natural. He identified them as Good, Osborne, and Tituba. The following night, he said, Sarah Good appeared in his chamber while he was in bed, sat upon his foot, and vanished when he moved to strike her. William Good reported finding a mark below his wife’s right shoulder the night before her examination, a mark he had never seen before. John Hughes described a large white dog following him home and disappearing, then later a gray cat appearing inside his locked room in a strange light. Braybrook recalled Good leaping from her horse three times during transport and declaring she was not afraid, because the only witness against her was an “Indian.“
What shifted on March 5 was not the content of the claims and who was making them. This was no longer just the afflicted girls. These were adult men in the community, filing formal documents with the court. Including the spouse of an accused.
March 6, 1692: A New Name
On March 6, Ann Putnam Jr. finally put a name to the specter that had been attacking her since March 3. Elizabeth Proctor.
Elizabeth had been born Elizabeth Bassett in Lynn, sometime between 1647 and 1651. Her grandmother, Ann Burt, was a healer who had been accused of witchcraft there in1669. Like in many belief contexts today, those who fear witchcraft believe witchcraft runs through family lines. This was the belief about Ann Burt and Elizabeth Proctor. That accusation had followed Elizabeth’s family for more than twenty years before she ever came near a courtroom. She married John Proctor in 1674, his third marriage. Their household held children from his previous marriages, five children born to them together, and a twenty-year-old servant named Mary Warren.
Ann Putnam Jr. would testify later: “On the 3rd of March, 1692, I saw the apparition of Goody Proctor amongst the witches, and she did almost choke me immediately and bite and pinch me. But I did not know who she was till the 6th of March that I saw her at a meeting.”
March 7, 1692: Three Things at Once
On March 7, 1692, three separate crises converged on a single day, and together they set the community on a course to tear itself apart.
First, Increase Mather and William Phips departed London. Mather had spent years there resolving the colony’s foundational legal problem. The original charter, revoked in 1684, had left Massachusetts under an interim government with no formal authority. He negotiated its replacement and secured Phips, a Maine-born treasure hunter with little political experience, as the first royal governor of the new Province of Massachusetts Bay.
Secondly, local ministers met in Cambridge. They believed Massachusetts was a city upon a hill, built in the devil’s own territory, under organized satanic attack. That belief had not arrived in 1692. It had been building for decades. When the afflictions in Salem Village began, the framework was already in place.
And lastly, magistrates John Hathorne and Jonathan Corwin ordered Tituba, Sarah Good, and Sarah Osborne transferred to the Boston jail. Standard procedure. The 17th-century Boston prison was dark, cold in winter, infested with vermin. Sarah Good arrived with her infant daughter, born in December 1691. The jailkeeper got blankets for the baby.
March 8, 1692: Salem Elects Its Leaders
Salem held its annual town meeting on March 8 and voted in new selectmen and constables.
Philip English and Daniel Andrew were chosen as selectmen, but would be accused of witchcraft in May. John Higginson Jr., son of Salem Town’s senior minister, was elected. His sister would be arrested in June. From Salem Village came Israel Porter, who would later stand up for Rebecca Nurse, alongside John Putnam Jr. and Jonathan Putnam, who would both file formal accusations against their neighbors.
The men running Salem were not watching the witch hunt from a distance. They were inside it, as accusers, as the accused, as defenders. The community that would prosecute its neighbors for the next several months elected its leadership that week.
This Week’s Podcast: The Thing About Salem
Tituba as American Cultural Figure with Samaine Lockwood
We marked International Women’s Day with a conversation about one of Salem’s most central and most distorted figures: Tituba Indian. Guest Samaine Lockwood, associate professor of English at George Mason University and 2026 Fenwick Fellow, joins Josh and Sarah to discuss her forthcoming book, Tituba Indian: The History of an American Cultural Figure, which traces how Tituba has been imagined, distorted, and reclaimed across two centuries of American literature and culture.
Lockwood explains that 19th century Salem novels are numerous, but rarely center on Tituba. When she does appear, she is depicted through racist stereotypes as old, confessing immediately, lacking independent thought and functioning as a deliberate foil to the idealized young white woman who is wrongfully accused and emerges from her ordeal as a model citizen. Lockwood argues this pattern is inseparable from the era in which those novels were written, the decades of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments, emancipation, and contested questions of Black citizenship and suffrage.
It is not until the 20th century, and specifically Black feminist intellectuals like Ann Petry and Maryse Conde, that Tituba moves to the center of the Salem story. Petry’s Tituba of Salem Village, which preceded Conde’s I, Tituba: Black Witch of Salem by decades, is a particular focus. Lockwood calls it a genuinely great novel that remains far less known than it deserves to be.
The episode also included an invitation to the live International Women’s Day Zoom panel, Justice for Women Accused of Witchcraft in Africa, featuring Dr. Leo Igwe, Chief Magistrate Safiya Musa Salihu, Dr. Barrister Dise Ogbise Goddy Harry, broadcast journalist Hauwa Mundi, and Maimonat Mohammad. This event is now available as an episode on The Thing About Witch Hunts podcast.
Key People This Week
Increase Mather (1639–1723): Senior Puritan minister and president of Harvard College. Negotiated the 1691 colonial charter in London and secured Phips’s appointment as governor.
Sir William Phips (1651–1695): First royal governor of the Province of Massachusetts Bay. Arrived May 1692 to find jails full and no legal system in place. Authorized the Court of Oyer and Terminer.
Sarah Good (c. 1653–1692): One of the first three accused. Transferred to Boston jail March 7 with her infant daughter. Executed July 19, 1692.
Sarah Osborne (c. 1643–1692): One of the first three accused. Died in the Boston prison May 10, 1692, before trial.
Tituba: Enslaved woman in the Parris household. Confessed and named nine names in the devil’s book. The only one of the three original accused to survive.
Elizabeth Proctor (c. 1647–1699): Named by Ann Putnam Jr. on March 6 as the owner of a specter that had been attacking her since March 3. Her grandmother Ann Burt had been accused of witchcraft in 1669.
Discussion
Seven names in the devil’s book remained unidentified after Tituba’s confession. That detail alone shifted the crisis from a local accusation into a colony-wide hunt. How does the search for an unknown enemy change the way a community treats its own members?
Drop your thoughts in the comments.
See you next week.
Progress Check
Coming next week: The accusations are about to expand dramatically beyond the original three women. New names enter the court records, new families are drawn into the crisis, and the question of who can be trusted reaches further into the community.
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Resources and Links
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Useful Websites:
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- Find My Massachusetts Legislators
- Massachusetts Witch Trials
- Peabody Essex Museum Salem Witch Trials Collection
- Primary Sources
Books:
- Bernard Rosenthal, ed., Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt
- Emerson W. Baker, A Storm of Witchcraft
- Marilynne K. Roach, The Salem Witch Trials: A Day-by-Day Chronicle
- Mary Beth Norton, In the Devil’s Snare
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