Describes the events of the seventeenth-century Salem witchcraft trials, recounting the most notable cases and discussing the way the trials were conducted.

Harvard graduate student Connie Godwin is determination personified. She will get her doctorate and find success as a historian, whether her aura-reading mother understands her bookishness or not. But first she has to contend with her tweedy adviser{u2019}s oddly urgent demands and her late grandmother{u2019}s incredibly old, long-abandoned house in Marblehead, Massachusetts. The house is cloaked in vines and stuffed with dusty old bottles and books,...

Killing the Witches revisits the events of 1692 and 1693 in Salem Village, Massachusetts. What began as a mysterious affliction of two young girls who suffered violent fits and exhibited strange behavior soon spread to other young women. Rumors of demonic possession and witchcraft consumed Salem. Soon three women were arrested under suspicion of being witches, but as the hysteria spread, more than two hundred people were accused. Thirty were found...