What Happened To The Bodies Of The Salem Witch Trial Victims?

The Reverend George Burroughs stood on the gallows looking out at the crowd. Many had once been part of his congregation when he was the pastor of the first meetinghouse in Salem Village a decade earlier. But on August 19, 1692, he was about to be hanged as the ringleader of a coven of witches. He'd continued to proclaim his innocence since the authorities had dragged him back to Salem, Massachusetts from his home in Maine, but in the midst of the frenzied madness of the witch trials, his protestations did him no good. As Burroughs prepared to die, he loudly began reciting the Lord's Prayer.

After his execution — along with four others that day — the authorities dragged Burroughs' body by the rope used to kill him to a shallow pit where he was dumped with the other victims. He was just one of 19 people hanged for witchcraft during the hysteria that began in January 1692 and lasted for more than a year. Another victim died when his captors crushed him to death for refusing to enter a plea in court (seven others died in prison awaiting trial). The final resting places of nearly all the victims who were hanged remains a mystery.

In January 1692, two young Salem girls began having fits that a local doctor blamed on witchcraft. In swift succession, several other girls began suffering from the same symptoms and accused three people of being witches — an enslaved woman named Tituba, a poor elderly woman, Sarah Osborn, and Sarah Good, who was unhoused. Soon, the accusers at the center of the Salem witch trials began implicating a growing list of people in the region. A series of trials followed, and by that August, when Rev. George Burroughs stood atop the gallows, six others had already been put to death.

Robert Calef, a Boston merchant and critic of the trials, witnessed the execution of Burroughs and the other four victims that day. "When he was cut down, he was dragged by the halter to a hole, or grave, between the rocks, about two feet deep, his shirt and breeches being pulled off, and an old pair of trowsers [sic] of one executed put on his lower parts," Calef wrote in his account of the trials, "More Wonders of the Invisible World," published in 1700. He recalled that the grave was so shallow one of Burroughs' "hands and his chin" and the foot of another victim were left uncovered.

Because the victims of the Salem trials were considered witches, they were denied a Christian burial in consecrated ground. The authorities most likely buried the bodies quickly after the executions that day in August to prevent the summer heat from quickly putrefying the remains. Eight more executions followed in September. Like the previous victims, these bodies were also unceremoniously dumped in a mass grave near the gallows on what is known as Proctor's Ledge. It's on the perimeter of what is now Danvers, but was then known as Salem Village.

No human remains have been found near the site of the gallows, leaving what happened to their bodies a mystery. In the case of at least three of the hanging victims, it's believed their families removed their bodies and reburied them in private cemeteries. There is satisfactory evidence that John Proctor — who Arthur Miller used as the protagonist of his famous 1953 play "The Crucible" — Rebecca Nurse, and George Jacobs Sr. were buried on their family's properties in unmarked graves.

John Proctor was the first man to be accused of witchcraft during this tumultuous episode and, like the Rev. Robert Burroughs, was vocal in his opposition to the witch hysteria. Proctor's pregnant wife Elizabeth and their six children were also accused of witchcraft. Elizabeth was imprisoned but survived her ordeal. The authorities hanged John Proctor in August 1692 on the same day as Burroughs and threw his body into the shallow grave with the rest of the victims.

It's believed that Proctor's family snuck over to the burial pit at night, recovered his body, and interred him in an unmarked grave on their property in Peabody, Massachusetts. Over the years, researchers have attempted to locate Proctor's exact burial site without success, but have narrowed it down to two sites a little more than a mile from each other. The remains of only one of the Salem witch trial hanging victims, George Jacobs Sr., have been found, and there is only circumstantial evidence that they were actually his bones.

George Jacobs Sr. died on the gallows the same day as both John Proctor and the Rev. Robert Burroughs. And, as with Proctor, legend has it that his family retrieved his body. His grandson came by night, strapped Jacobs' body to a horse, and buried him on the family property in what is now Danvers. Later property owners in the 1850s discovered human bones that matched Jacobs' physical traits. They reburied them in the same spot. Then, 100 years later, developers were doing work on the property when a bulldozer unearthed the grave.

The town of Danvers removed the remains and eventually reburied them at the site of the Rebecca Nurse homestead. Jacobs' new grave, made to look as it was from the 17th century, has a quote from his trial: "Well, burn me or hang me, I will stand in the truth of Christ." Nurse was a well-respected resident and 71-year-old grandmother when her neighbors accused her of witchcraft. The sheriff hanged her on July 19, 1692, and her family secretly buried her on their Danvers property in an unmarked grave. Her descendents erected a granite memorial in her honor in 1885. 

Beyond the puzzle of what happened to the bodies of most of the victims, there remains another mystery that still surrounds the Salem witch trials: How did this tragedy even happen? Theories on its causes include mass hysteria, a brutal winter, and a hallucination-inducing fungus found on cereal grains. While the exact cause of this brutal episode in American history may never be truly known, researchers may still one day discover the final resting places of its lost victims, especially in light of a relatively recent discovery. 

In 2016, researchers confirmed that Proctor's Ledge was the site of the gallows used during the witch trials. Sidney Perley, a local historian, had pinpointed the location in 1921. On July 19, 2017, the town of Danvers dedicated a memorial to the victims of the Salem witch trials at Proctor's Ledge on the 325th anniversary of the executions of Rebecca Nurse and four other women. The memorial contains the 19 names of the women and men who died there.

[Featured image by Jangseung92 via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC BY-SA 4.0]