In the winter of 1692, a nine-year-old girl and her eleven-year-old cousin began having violent fits inside a parsonage in Salem Village, Massachusetts. They screamed, threw objects, contorted their bodies, complained of being bitten and pinched by invisible hands, and reported seeing spectral figures that no one else could see. Within weeks, more girls in the tightly knit Puritan community were exhibiting the same behaviour, and the local doctor, finding no physical explanation, delivered a verdict that would set the entire episode in motion. He concluded the girls were bewitched. What followed between February 1692 and May 1693 would become one of the most studied, debated and haunting episodes in American history, resulting in the execution of 19 people, the imprisonment of more than 150 others and the death of at least five more in jail, all within a community of fewer than 600 people living in a cold, stressed and deeply frightened corner of colonial New England.
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