Salem Witch Trials: From Danvers to Salem

It begins in the household of Rev. Samuel Parris. In February 1692 his daughter Betty (9) and niece Abigail Williams (11) began to have fits: they screamed, threw things about the room, uttered strange sounds and crawled under furniture. The village had voted Parris the deed to the parsonage and two acres in 1689, against an earlier village resolution. A doctor could find no physical evidence of any ailment, and other young women in the village began to behave the same way.

Location precision: The Parsonage site in Danvers is not pinned; the exact location is not confirmed in the sources used, so the route shows no map pin.

In March 1692 Rebecca Nurse, a 71-year-old churchwoman, was accused of witchcraft, which troubled neighbours who thought that if such upstanding people could be witches, anybody could be. She was hanged on 19 July 1692 with four other women. Her farmhouse, built about 1700, still stands at 149 Pine Street in Danvers as a museum, with a reconstructed Salem Village meetinghouse in the grounds and a granite obelisk of 1885 carrying a poem by Whittier.

Visitor guidance: Four older rooms are open to the public; the grounds hold the reconstructed meetinghouse and the Nurse burial ground.

Judge Jonathan Corwin bought this unfinished house in 1675 and finished it. In April 1692 he and John Hathorne examined newly arrested suspects such as Sarah Cloyce and Elizabeth Proctor at a meeting in Salem Town. The house at 310 Essex Street is one of the few structures still standing in Salem with direct ties to the trials. It was moved back from the street around 1940 to escape road widening, and the city now runs it as a museum with self-guided tours.

Visitor guidance: Managed by the City of Salem as a museum at 310 Essex Street, with self-guided tours.

Nineteen people were hanged in Salem in 1692, on four dates: 10 June, 19 July, 19 August and 22 September, when eight died. For centuries the summit of Gallows Hill was blamed. In 2016 a team of researchers, using old maps and ground-penetrating radar, identified the site at Proctor's Ledge, at the base of the hill and easier for spectators to reach. The city dedicated a memorial to the victims there in 2017.

Location precision: The pin marks Pope Street near the base of Gallows Hill, not the exact spot on the ledge.

Visitor guidance: A memorial stands at the site; keep to the public pavement and respect the residential neighbourhood.

For the 300th anniversary in August 1992 Salem dedicated a memorial park, with a stone slab bench set into the wall for each person executed in 1692. Speakers included playwright Arthur Miller and Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel. Legal clearing of names came slowly: the last convicted person, Elizabeth Johnson Jr., was officially exonerated in 2022, 329 years after her conviction.

Location precision: The pin marks the memorial park in Salem town centre; the sources used do not give its street address.

Visitor guidance: An open memorial park in central Salem; the benches are named for each victim.