On 19 August 1692, five people were executed by hanging at Salem, Massachusetts, after being convicted of witchcraft: Martha Carrier, George Jacobs Sr., George Burroughs, John Willard, and John Proctor. The executions were among the most notorious of the Salem witch trials, a period of mass hysteria that gripped colonial New England.
Fourteen more people would be executed before the year was out, and 150 others were imprisoned. The Salem trials remain one of the darkest episodes in early American legal history.
