Centuries after witch trials, Mass. group seeks to clear nearly 200 names

By Kim Bellware
October 31, 2023 at 6:14 p.m. EDT



Two people dressed as witches sit on a bench outside the Witches' Ball ahead of Halloween in Salem, Mass., on Oct. 27. (Joseph Prezioso/AFP via Getty Images)

In spring 1692, a handful of women in the New England town of Salem Village had been arrested on “suspicion of acts of witchcraft” when authorities issued a warrant for Dorothy Good, age 4.

Dorothy’s pregnant mother, Sarah, was already in prison, having been arrested on similar charges two months earlier. Sarah Good spent roughly four months in prison before she was hanged on Gallows Hill. Her baby was born in prison and soon died too, according records from the Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcription Project housed at the University of Virginia.

Dorothy remained jailed for more than seven months (“chained in a dungeon so hardly used” her father later wrote in a court petition). She was released after the deaths of her mother and baby sister, with her father observing that the ordeal had driven the child to insanity.

More than 300 years later, a group of advocates is pressing for recognition of victims like Dorothy, who have been left out of previous efforts to clear the names of those convicted or executed during the witch hunt hysteria of the Puritan era. Pardons and exonerations have largely focused on those executed in Salem, which leaves nearly 200 others unaccounted for, including those who were accused, imprisoned, indicted or lived elsewhere in the commonwealth.

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