Witches were burned at the stake during the Salem witch trials.
No one was burned at Salem. Nineteen people were hanged, one was pressed to death with stones, and several died in jail. Burning was the European punishment, not the American one.
What changed?
Ask most Americans how the accused witches of Salem met their end, and the answer comes quickly: burned at the stake. Halloween imagery confirms it, the silhouette at the bonfire, the smoke rising. The mental picture is so vivid and so available that it rarely occurs to anyone to question it. The burning of witches has become the synecdoche for religious persecution, the image that stands for every excess of Puritan severity.
No one was burned at Salem. The accusation, trial, and execution of more than thirty people in and around Salem Village in 1692 constitute one of the most documented criminal injustices in American colonial history, and the documentary record is clear about what happened. Nineteen people were hanged by the neck on Gallows Hill. One man, Giles Corey, refused to enter a plea and was pressed to death with heavy stones over two days, a procedure called peine forte et dure designed to compel a response. At least five more people died in jail awaiting trial, including an infant.
Burning was the punishment for witchcraft in continental Europe and in Scotland. In England and its American colonies, the common law penalty for felony was hanging, and witchcraft had been classified as a felony by statute. The legal tradition mattered. English and American jurisprudence took different paths from the continental tradition, and those paths produced different modes of execution even when prosecuting the same alleged crime.
The confusion is probably downstream of the European imagery that saturated popular culture, the trial scenes, the woodcuts, the literary treatments of witch persecution that drew on continental cases. Salem was an American story told partly through European visual conventions, and the substitution of one execution method for another went unnoticed by most people because the underlying horror seemed interchangeable.
Salem's actual history is disturbing enough without embellishment. The accused were hanged on the basis of "spectral evidence", testimony that the defendant's spirit had appeared to the witness in a dream or vision. The governor eventually halted the trials when his own wife was accused. The colony formally apologized and paid reparations decades later. The facts, examined honestly, need no dramatic improvement.
