Over 400 years ago, nineteen people were hanged and one pressed to death because the Massachusetts Bay Colony got it into its collective head that witches were attacking the community. This was not an idea pushed by the people at the top, though their response strengthened and prolonged the delusion. It began, rather, in the homes and meeting-houses of small communities, when teenage girls started acting out in strange and dangerous ways. This behavior spread, appearing, to the confused and alarmed citizens of the colony, as if their bodies had been taken over by evil spirits or demons.

This was a community of Christians – God-fearing, pious Puritans who had carved a way of life for themselves out of an unfriendly wilderness. So naturally, they turned to the explanation that had developed in their culture: it was witches. Since the years of the Black Plague, only some three hundred years prior to this sudden plague of possessed girls, witches had been blamed for the evils that suddenly overtook communities. And those accused of witchcraft were the people who either did not fit into their communities or were seen as a burden to their families or others: Jews, the non-pious, elderly widows, impoverished women, Gypsies.